I was able to finish this episode editing, first of all, here is the end result for a new OE Global Voices podcast
This conversation was with two of our OE Global Board members, as an introduction to them as people, leaders, and thinkers. Maria asked me at recording time if she.could respond in her native Spanish to my questions asked in English. Why not? The second half is another recording with Perrine- I made the same offer since her first language is French, but she wanted us to chat in English. But I did ask her one question to respond in French to speak to her Francophone colleagues.
Again, I have source audio with three spoken languages. Since January 2023, I have switched from using a traditional wave form editor, many years using Audacity, to Descript which not only generates transcripts, but turns audio editing to an experience of doing it mostly the text of the content – it’s been a game changer for someone who started podcasting in the early 2000s.
You can find more details of how the podcasts are made at https://podcast.oeglobal.org/about/.
I have used Descript previously to transcribe a episodes that were recorded completely in Spanish; I had gotten access to the beta versions of the newest “Underlord” features of the tool (just released this week) which included ones for translating transcripts, but uit was not quite able to handle the multlingual aspects. Still, it provided the main transcript of this episode with three languages represented - or follow along with the version you can listen to and see the transcript displayed.
But what I really wanted to do is have versions of the transcript with all content in Spanish, and another in French, and also in English, all the content. Plus I wanted to have the podcast published web page include translations of the episode description, some of the quoted, in the 3 languages.
I ended up doing all of this with back and forth copy pasting from the original transcript into Google Translate, using the language detection mode, I could used, say mixed text of English and Spanish to translate all into Spanish or French. It was a bit back and forth, and of course, is far from ideal, but seems to me good enough.
The other problem it solved for me is fine tuning the editing of languages I am not fluent in. For Marisol’s spoken Spanish, the Descrpt transcription often gets the places it marks as sentence endings wrong, and then as I do not understand Spanish, I cannot do much editing of the audio. But having an English transcription, I was able to edit it by matching the flow from English to Spanish.
Again, some of this is helped by tools, but also took quite a bit of manual processing. There likely are more elegant or practical solutions (e.g. “Alan should learn Spanish!”) but to be honest, I like the hand crafted parts, even if it took a bit longer than ideal.
Mostly, I want to be able to give more people we interact with the opportunity to speak in their natural language.
Beyond all this blather on the technology and please enjoy the conversations we are sharing with our board members, and get a chance to know them as both leaders and regular people, their interests in say, running and family and art and the places they live.
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