Captions Requested: Discussion: Team Dashboard and Language Settings

[Claude Almansi]

Dear co-particpants of the Captions Requested and Music Captioning teams,

I hope 2013 started well for you, and will continue so.

On  Dec. 20, 2012, the new release Amara 1.2.1 introduced several changes: see http://support.universalsubtitles.org/categories/6573/forums/80247/topics/10076
for their official description.

Two of these changes are particularly relevant to us:

1) Our teams' home pages - respectively, http://www.amara.org/en/teams/captions-requested/  and http://www.amara.org/en/teams/musiccaptioning/ - are no longer showing to everyone the same straightforward list of team videos listed by reverse chronological order, but something called "Dashboard", which varies for each user, according to the languages s/he has indicated in
the settings.
The straigtforward list still exists, but it has been moved to a subpage - respectively  http://www.amara.org/en/teams/musiccaptioning/videos/ and  http://www.amara.org/en/teams/captions-requested/videos/, which can also be reached via the team's Videos tab or, in each of its videos, by clicking the link to the team beneath the player:

2) These language settings - which can be edited by clicking on "Select your languages" in the blue band toppish of all Amara pages - no longer allow users to indicate a) more than 6 languages; b) a preferred language.

As a result, the Dashboard  also suggests that  you create subtitles in languages you only translate from.
Moreover, when a video  is in a language you don't know, but there are subtitles translated in one of your settings languages, the Dashboard suggests you translate those.
Just ignore both these types of irrelevant suggestions.
If you have not indicated any language in the settings, the Dashboard page will incite you to do so, and also give a link to the straightforward list of team videos.

The proportion of relevant dashboard suggestions is a function of a fixed constant - the number of languages you can subtitle in divided by the number of languages you indicated in the settings - but also of variables: the number of team videos in languages you understand and the number of their already completed subtitles in languages you can subtitle in, for which the dashboard won't make suggestions.
This relevance will therefore vary for each of us, and also according to what videos and  subtitles are available in a team at a given moment.
So it's up to each of us to decide if we want to review these Dashboard suggestions or go directly to the straightforward list of videos.

Considering the incidence of the languages indicated in the settings on the (ir)relevance of team dashboard suggestions, we could attempt to twiddle them. But due to the variables involved, it is difficult to foresee the effect of such twiddling.

Yet there is a simple thing we can do to facilitate actual collaborative subtitling: list the languages we can subtitle in and those we only translate from in our profiles, i.e. in the "Bio" part
of http://www.amara.org/en/profiles/edit/ .
This way, other human subtitlers will know more precisely whom they can ask  about a given
language question. And those of you who know more than 6 languages will be able to list them all.
True, the Amara software won't be able to make use of such an "in-Bio" list, but neither to tamper with it - as its last update did with the Settings languages.

Best,

Claude Almansi

Note: I shall also send this message via Amara messaging to the participants of the Music Captioning and Captions Requested teams. It is posted here - as well as on the "Music Captioning"  Google group - for easier discussion