On our Youtube channel we have posted three short Ancient History documentary clips, that are currently in German. These are available as Creative Commons downloads, so our plan is to translate and dub them into Latin.
There are close to 200 clips in the full Creative Commons series by ZDF, which include science and climate change information, modern, medieval and ancient history. We have chosen the most relevant to a Latin-learning audience, being ancient, medieval and renaissance history.
As a first step, we created German and English subtitles (not a small job!) for the most relevant 40-odd clips. Vicipaedia volunteers have translated subtitles for the first ten clips into Latin.
We then put the word out to some other language communities. In particular, a series of clips dubbed in Welsh have been published on Wicipedia.
The next step is to double check the Latin before we make recordings – we won’t get a second chance, so the Latin needs to be as polished as is possible! Thankfully, we have had a couple of excellent volunteers, but get in touch if you would like to help. In particular, there are at least 30 more scripts that could be translated.
We have five volunteers who are helping with the audio. Again, given the number of clips, if you have impeccable Latin pronunciation and delivery, let us know if you can help. Please link to any audio you have online.
If this goes well, then we could also do simplified Latin versions of these videos, for learners in their first years. There are some other sources of high quality Creative Commons video content, and hope that we can consider these as well.
Above all, we hope this can inspire people using other languages to translate and dub Creative Commons videos, especially those that struggle with high quality content, or content for learners. We believe this is the ideal way for smaller languages to help with language learning and usage.
Do get in touch if any of this is of interest, or if you would like to help while sitting at home, why not join us on Patreon?
Image CC-By ZDF/Terra X/interscience film/Faber Courtial, Gero von Boehm/Hassan Rashedi, Andreas Tiletzek, Jörg Courtial Details and licence.