Tamil subtitles

I saw this Diaspora* promotional video posted on Diaspora* (https://diasp.org/posts/463943) and there was a request to translate it to as many languages as possible. Myself and Bala anna thought that we could contribute. So a couple of nights back, we sat together and tried to translate the English subtitles to Tamil. As we progressed sentence by sentence, we realized that we were out of touch with proper Tamil, though we have lived most of our lives in Tamil Nadu. There were a lot of words in English that we didn’t remember or couldn’t find out the Tamil equivalent. Google Transliterate and Google Translate came to our help. The challenge with using Google Translate was that it gave us the literal translation of the words and not the actual meaning that English sentences conveyed. So we had to add our own touch to a lot of the words that showed up on Google Translate. For example, I translated ‘Social Network’ to ‘???? ????????????’ but I have no idea if it is correct. Constructing words creatively was so much fun that hours went by without either of us noticing. We also took liberty to rename the characters Zoey and Finn to ???? and ??????? as they were much more Tamil-friendly 😉 There were some sentences and words that were extremely challenging – “personal profiles, groups, apps, mobile interface, mentions, ash texts, re-sharing , and on top, there is social network’s integration”. Now how would you translate that? See the video to find out.

Though the subtitle used in the video does leave out some of the words and meaning from the original transcript, I did have a version that translated it fully. 🙂 The subtitle is hosted on GitHub and please help us in improving the quality of the translation. YouTube has mangled the Tamil text and spelling in some places while displaying the caption, but the GitHub repository should have the correct text.

I feel an immense sense of happiness and satisfaction in contributing to a wonderful initiative! If you have any issues in watching the embedded video, you could watch it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4mMSxWEnjU. Do turn on the Tamil subtitles and give me your feedback. 🙂