Hi All
As I already told some of you by normal e-mail, yesterday (July14, 2013) afternoon, at the request of Vance Stevens, Lucia Bartolotti and I animated an online meeting with the teachers of the
Learning 2gether network about Amara (
event description -
YouTube recording -
subtitling page). It was lively, with a lot of questions and ideas.
We had
asked the participants to take a dive into Amara first, because describing a tool in a meeting, whether F2F or online, is boring. But also because the June 29 upgrade happened between the announcement of the meeting and the meeting itself: so amidst the baffling aftershocks of the upgrade, in particular the still undocumented new editor, we didn't quite know anymore how to present Amara. This way, it went well.
Still, for ourselves, Lucia and I needed to understand these aftershocks, or at least try to. I am bookmarking with Diigo the resulting posts on the Amara general help forum and tagging these boomarks
upgrade_aftershock. Amara's line of only replying to topics on the TED help forum because TED pays for it, but not on the general one, seems particularly self-defeating in this instance, as even some TED team members continue to post about TED video issues on the general help forum.
Mami Kawade is a TED team member and she posted about two important upgrade issues on the general forum. One was also raised by Dharma Lee on the TED forum, but less completely. In the end, getting no reply from Amara staff on the general forum, she did as I suggested: reposted on the TED forum yesterday.
Shatha Nasser, also a TED team member, posted about an issue of a TED team video that might be connected to the upgrade (no activity on that video since the upgrade). I made the same suggestion to her.
Also, why add the ONE tutorial so far about the new editor -
http://ted-support.amara.org/support/solutions/articles/107527-the-transcript-is-missing-when-i-resume-my-translation - only to the TED help "Solutions" section, and not to the general help one, when the same issue was also raised in the forum there? And even if it hadn't, this is not a TED-specific issue.
A slightly preferential treatment for the TED team as TED is a paying customer is understandable. But this gives the impression that you've not only sold services to TED, but the whole of Amara, lock, stock and barrel. And even if you have - I hope not, though I admire TED and am a member of the TED team too - this obstinate ignoring of other Amara users' feedbacks is not going to improve TED subtitlers' experience either.
Claude