Media TT – Translated films

The observant may have noticed that a new link has been added to the menu, Media TT.
TT is an abbreviation of Transcribed and Translated. I initially thought of calling it TT media, but that reminded me a bit too much of Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå.
It is simply about films that have been transcribed and translated into Swedish and English.

I have invested in equipment to be able to run local AI. The initial idea was to use it mainly for programming. Unfortunately, it turned out that it does not quite measure up compared to OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s solutions. Financially, it is probably one of the worst investments I have made. But on the other hand, it has been both educational and interesting, and I have still found some use for it. It has been a long time since I spent money on something that was not directly necessary, but I can’t help feeling that the money would have been better spent in Ukraine…

Anyway, it made me think about what else local AI can be used for, and one of the first ideas that came up was precisely to try to translate films almost automatically. Zelensky has a channel on YouTube, but everything there is in Ukrainian, and even though it is often possible to get it transcribed into Ukrainian, it still takes time to cut and paste to get it translated. It simply doesn’t happen that you do it yourself except for individual films. At the same time, I wanted to follow how his speeches etc. have developed since the war started and, of course, also easily get new films translated.

It ended up with me building a server that can receive requests and run all the necessary steps and then deliver the result in the form of finished translations. To that, I added a plugin to WordPress that sends the request to the server and when the response comes back, it first lets me review and correct the most obvious mistakes before I then publish it. It turned out to be quite a smooth solution in the end.

Sure, it is far from perfect, especially confusing when there are multiple speakers involved. Sometimes there are errors already in the transcription itself, and then of course the errors carry over to the translation. Often it fails to reliably identify the different speakers, etc. I personally think it is still good enough for it to work.

I have already processed a number of speeches etc. from Zelensky, some even before February 24, 2022, and then roughly the first 20 days.
I find it interesting to follow the development. At the same time, it is sad to see that some of the demands Zelensky made on Europe and NATO in the first days have still not been fulfilled and also that what eventually did happen took an enormously long time.
What I would like to know is if there are others who find this interesting? Whether I should continue working my way up to today, or if I should perhaps be content with translating new speeches as they come? Now the historical material is enormous, often three films per day, so a middle way might be to only select one per week.

Besides Zelensky, I have also set up a category for our dear Accentman (RFSU News), but I will not process any old material there.

Then I personally think that it is mainly Ukrainian material that is interesting. Both to get an insight into how the Ukrainians themselves report and mainly because that is where it is difficult to translate oneself. So far, I have also created a category for Militarnyi, which mostly deals with weapons and weapon systems, as well as a Mixed Ukrainian channels category. There, translations from several different senders from Ukraine coexist. Some of them are in English, but most are in Ukrainian.

Since this takes quite a bit of time even though it is largely automatic (and it locks up my AI so I cannot use it for other things), I would like to hear what you think? Is this something you appreciate enough for me to continue, or is it perhaps a waste of time?

Before you answer the survey, it is of course good if you at least look through some of the material.

If you have suggestions for other channels to follow or other comments (poor quality, etc.), please write a comment.

NOTE! Today’s Ukraine post can be found here.