Beyond Words: How Video Translation is Opening Doors to Knowledge

Author(s): Naveen Krishnan

Originally published on Towards AI.

I grew up in India, where I always lived among a polyglot of languages. This diversity is lovely, to be sure. But it also creates problems, especially when you are trying to learn and want access to new material in a language you do not speak. I can’t tell you how often I turned on an online course only to hear what seemed to be totally different in a language I could not really understand. And though the content was clearly good, without being able to turn it into my own words, I was exposed only to snacks of meaning, losing the deeper insights. Job interviews and certification exams were op chances to grab, too, when language stopped me from accessing key resources.

For many of us in India and around the world, the internet provides humanity with unlimited learning resources, but language barriers have blocked so much knowledge from reaching us. When I came across the Video Translation Service on Azure, I felt sure this tool had the power to change the lives of people like me who have been marginalized by language.

What Video Translation Offers

Video Translation Service provides a solution to this problem. Simply speaking, spoken-language video content can be interpreted into still another language in near real time by this service. Now people who don’t speak the original tongue can have access to the rich store of knowledge that knowledge contains. Picture a universal language subtitling and dubbing facility for videos, facilitating seamless learning, working, and cooperation across all sorts of language barriers.

By now you must have a general idea of how this service works. The technology for service includes several main components: speech recognition, language translation and subtitling/dubbing. When a speaker in a video speaks, the service converts his words into text. It then turns this text into the language you need and adds subtitles or dubbing depending on what your reader wants to read. Azure Video Translation Service is different from the traditional translation service that needs pre-production. Meanwhile, it really happens in near real time.

Getting Started with Azure Video Translation

To create a video translation project, follow these steps:

Sign in to the Speech Studio.

Select the subscription and Speech resource to work with.

Select Video translation.

On the Create and Manage Projects page, select Create a project.

On the New Project page, select Voice type.

You can select Prebuilt neural voice or Personal voice for Voice type. For prebuilt neural voice, the system automatically selects the most suitable prebuilt voice by matching the speaker’s voice in the video with prebuilt voices. For personal voice, the system offers a model that generates high-quality voice replication in a few seconds.

Upload your video file by dragging and dropping the video file or selecting the file manually.

Ensure the video is in .mp4 format, less than 500 MB, and shorter than 60 minutes.

Provide the Project name, and select the Number of speakers and language of the video, Translate to language.

If you want to use your own subtitle files, select Add subtitle file. You can choose to upload either the source subtitle file or the target subtitle file. The subtitle file can be in WebVTT or JSON format. You can download a sample VTT file for your reference by selecting Download sample VTT file.

After reviewing the pricing information and code of conduct, then proceed to create the project.

Once the upload is complete, you can check the processing status on the project tab.

After the project is created, you can select the project to review detailed settings and make adjustments according to your preferences.

The Technology Behind the Scenes

The Technology behind the Scenes In the background, it’s all about Microsoft Azure’s advanced AI and machine learning capacity. Microsoft has integrated into its translation service advanced neural networks and natural language processing (NLP), which work together. For example, these systems can handle things all the way from complex linguistic elements like slang and regional dialect to questions on mood. Then AI does much more than translate words — it grasps the nuances and intentions behind them so that translation feels natural.

Oral translation consists of several stages: The AI first identifies and transcribes the spoken words in the video. For transcription of the pages, we use Azure’s translation models to convert into the target language. The translated text will either be displayed as subtitles or converted into synthetic speech for dubbing. Azure’s service supports a wide range of languages and dialects; each interaction makes its model increasingly accurate. The more data the system processes, the better it understands the many, sometimes subtle differences between various languages and cultures. For example, Azure’s AI learns to distinguish between formal and informal communications from the tone of speech detected in the film thus making its translations more suitable for each specific video.

The Real Impact: Learning Without Language Limits

As someone who has struggled in other languages, it is important and encouraging that there are services for translation. For example, imagine learning a new technical skill where the best course online is offered only in a language you don’t speak. You might look at it for a few minutes, looking for visual clues, but without knowing what they’re saying in that language all of the pertinent information and insights are lost on you; or you can hear sounds but not their meanings. With Azure’s Video Translation, all this disappears. Now, one can access courses, lectures, and video tutorials from any place in the world, even a remote corner of China. This is not merely a matter of convenience; it means equal access to knowledge and opportunity for all. Video translation can open avenues on education, job training and self-cultivation while also creating an all-inclusive world available to everyone among its inhabitants.

Use Cases Across Different Sectors

While education is a key use case, the benefits of video translation are applicable across an array of industries:

1. Corporate Training and Global Collaboration video translation is being used by global companies to give employees worldwide access training materials. A tech company based in America, for example, may now train its staff in Asia, South America and Europe with no problems of language barrier. This method allows teams to work better together and creates more opportunity for all members: everyone has access to the same resources and chances alike.
2. Healthcare and Medical Training Healthcare professionals depend on ongoing training to stay at the forefront, and the best medical lectures, seminars, and courses in the world aren’t always free. Video translation can enable doctors, nurses, and students of medicine regardless of tongue to stay with the latest research and insights in their field. Picture a doctor in Brazil learning a new technique from Germany’s greatest surgeon, down to every last detail on video. Facilitating this kind of contact could lead to more informed healthcare outcomes worldwide.
3. Legal and Compliance Training The language of law is notoriously abstruse, and compliance training often contains terms that are difficult enough to understand easily even in one’s own language. Video translation can make this material much easier to take in, helping staff around the world keep up with compliance standards, understand office rules and regulations, and do things right.
4. Tourism and Cultural Exchange For travelers, video translation can add a whole new layer of interest to an overseas trip with translated tours, cultural videos and educational programming on local custom and tradition. Using Azure’s service, museums, historical sites and institutions of culture can now offer tours translated into other languages. This makes local culture accessible to tourists at much deeper levels of engagement. Language is not only about words; it involves context, culture, and emotion. Catching these fine points can be difficult, especially when it concerns complex or specialized material. Take humor and proverbs for example — they often fail to make sense if given a rigid translation from one language to another, so that the AI is required understand and accommodate its environment given this kind of situation.

The Video Translation Service from Azure has been developed careful consideration given to the challenges and restrictions that are encountered in this area. So now it is equipped with AID models taking into account its context. This helps translators create sentences which conform to conversation flow, tone and so on rather than just word-for-word renditions of the source text. It also allows ethnocentric languages to be checked against such travail providing real highlighting points for any awkward or less popular word, ensuring that phrase does not lose its cultural features through translation into another language. Users can also train translation models to be industry-specific, integrating terms or expressions for example medical descriptions and jargon to provide precision in translation across specialized fields such as medicine, law and computer technology. Another problem is how to make the video and audio follow each other perfectly. Our translators are trying different approaches and algorithms to attack this, but so far they seem to offer smoothly synchronized version without any visible delay between speech and mouth movements. This technology is particularly crucial for live events in particular; even a short delay in translation could break the whole thing up.

Breaking Down Educational Barriers

For you, this isn’t just a technological breakthrough. It’s also deeply personal. I feel how frustrating it is to want to learn something new and yet held back from doing so by an unknown language. Adding language support to video can transform anyone’s experience like this anywhere in the globe, whether they are student, professional or just in between things.

You can imagine people in remote parts of India attending lectures from the best universities all over the world — grasping the most advanced education without being hindered by language difficulties. Or Think how many people might get valuable job training with online courses they did not have before. This technology can bring knowledge to the people, and opportunity as well — all people, no matter who they may be or where they live.

The Future of Video Translation

If anything, the uses of video translation technology will only continue to grow. It will soon be in all ordinary equipment — all the way from online tutorials to everyday video calls and virtual meetings that real soon, companies can make it standard procedure for their external and internal communications be multilingual removing language barriers from people’s ability to interact with one another.

The future is full of all kinds of hopes. Wouldn’t it be great to live in a world where distance class is meaningless, regardless of linguistic differences regardless of where people live can learn and communicate with the ideas which are now available globally in an instant? Like wind time video calls bring us this much closer to such a world and make it a little more possible.

Final Thoughts

Azure’s Video Translation Service is more than just a technological breakthrough: It’s a gateway to new opportunities, better understanding and closer cooperation. For people like me who find it difficult to get information in other languages, this technology offers hope.

Not only does it use video to provide translation, but it changes lives, gives learning power to the students, creates unity with working people and dispels the artificial barriers that used to exist between us all. This technology may not have enough time for the time being, but my hope is that it will leave something behind. Video translation is one of an array of knowledge lifeline that hope to make the world a better place one video at a time.

References

[1] Video translation — Speech service — Azure AI services | Microsoft Learn

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Published via Towards AI