Update #1 On The Making History Crowdfunding Campaign

I'm excited to announce that Chinese subtitles have been added to the MAKING HISTORY Crowdfunding Campaign pitch video!

It only took the help of FOUR people to get the pitch translated and uploaded as subtitles to my YouTube video. Special thanks goes to Hsiao Wan Lin (林曉婉) and Professor Lee (李清澤) for initially putting me in touch with Ms. Lin to do the translation.

One of my friends, Chia-Chun, who was involved with the movie Dear Taiwan (好國好民) told me that there was a way to add Chinese subtitles to a YouTube video. So I thought, great, how hard can it be to add the subtitles once I get the Chinese translation? 

But after I got the Chinese translation of my pitch,  I couldn't figure out how to add the subtitles to my YouTube video.

When I asked Robin about this he said that the subtitles would need to be embedded in the video file. This would mean that he'd have to reedit the video, which would be doable, but a bit of a technical feat. But this would also mean that I'd lose the current number of views of the video on YouTube.

So I went back to Chia-Chun  and she knew exactly what to do. She took care of it for me, but not without some effort. She had to create a caption file with text and time codes for when each line of text should be displayed.   She even did some extra translation of the first 20 seconds of my video, which is technically not part of my pitch and didn't initially get translated.  After she sent me the caption file, I uploaded it to YouTube and then VOILA! just like that the video was subtitled.

But then Chia-Chun noticed that "華僑美國社區"  had been used to translate the term Taiwanese American community. My Chinese is not that good, but I do know the character "華" which is often used to refer to Chinese or overseas Chinese. So it's a good thing that Chia-Chun caught this! She immediately changed the translation to "台美人社區" and resent me the file. This just goes to show how the nuances of translation can be so important. 

I reuploaded the new file overriding the previous file (Thank goodness)! I think Robin is quite happy about this too since it saved him the time of having to reedit the video. Truth be told there were revisions and edits done to the pitch video before it got to the one you see on YouTube now. Some of the edits were done just days before the campaign went live and I didn't want Robin to have to do any more work on the video! In the end uploading the captions was a much better solution.

Oh and by the way, you may have noticed that I said there were four people who helped to make this translation happen, one of the four is a good friend of mine who prefers to remain anonymous.

Making History: The Story of Su Beng is now 24% funded

I'm hoping that it reaches 25% by the two week mark on November 9. 

Making History:The Story of Su Beng (24% funded as of November 8, 2013)

Thank you to the first funders who have given the first 25%. There is a long ways to go still and I have a feeling that the battle is just about to begin!

There are also so many people to thank, who are voluntarily working behind the scenes to support me and this project in so many different ways.