Meta|φραση and OOONA team-up!
Meta|φραση renews its commitment to providing a high-tech education with the best online tools in the market
As announced in a recent newsletter issue, a wind of renewal is blowing at Meta|φραση. We have completed the upgrade of our infrastructure both in terms of our physical building that is now fully accessible to all, as well as our virtual presence. Starting with transferring all our courses on Moodle, we then focused on ensuring our lecturers and students are equipped with the best online tools in the market for their courses.
Video has become an integral part of our daily lives and video localization is one of the healthiest localization sectors, experiencing consistent and ongoing growth. Tasks such as subtitling, voice over and dubbing, which were predominantly reserved for media and entertainment content, are now becoming integral in all localization verticals. We pride ourselves in providing an education that is consistent with current market trends: our subtitling courses continue strong with seasoned subtitlers at the helm, who will guide you through their experience of working for an international clientele. We are proud to be joined by Dessi Verveniotou, Panagiotis Karousos and Emmanuella Patiniotaki for another academic year.
With the staggering increase in streaming content, shrinking localization timelines and to address concerns regarding security, media localization has moved to the cloud. All major providers have followed this trend adopting home-grown or commercially available subtitling platforms and require their workforces to familiarize themselves with them. This year we took it upon ourselves to research the platforms available in the market and form the necessary partnerships so that our students receive hands-on training in the tools they will eventually be asked to work with, so as to increase their employability potential.
Our search included proprietary platforms and gave us a sneak peek into the workflows employed by major localizers. We even used one such platform from a well-known media localizer in our classes earlier this year. Most of the large service providers in subtitling and dubbing today have developed their own platforms to handle their work. While the features in such tools can be very similar, the user interface and the naming conventions used are inextricably linked to the inhouse workflows each company employs for its production work.
We quickly decided it was more beneficial to our students to receive hands-on experience in tools that: a) are used by a large number of the language service providers (LSPs) and b) can be used independently by freelancers on their own projects, so we turned our sights to a number of commercially available solutions. While the list of tools available for media localization is a long one, and more are making their appearance every day, it was clear to us that one platform dominates the market: OOONA (www.ooona.net). After testing a handful of platforms thoroughly, we gave our seal of approval to OOONA, as we were most satisfied with the functionality and ease of the user interface in its Create, Translate, Review and Transcribe tools. With several other tools into its Toolkit to compliment all the video localization tasks a prospective client could ask for, it is no surprise that its clients include boutique LSPs but also large, international ones, as well as many content owners.
The big advantage of the OOONA platform however is the fact that it can be easily licensed to individual freelancers as well, on a modular basis. By training on OOONA’s tools, our students will not only be ready to work with several of the LSPs that use them. They will have also mastered a tool they can use to commission their own work, directly with content owners or service providers that have not built or licensed a subtitling platform. A lot of the traditional LSPs that are now in need of video localization services fall in that category. By being a one-stop-shop for all their clients’ needs, translators can expand their prospective clientele to the entire video localization market and command higher rates for their work.
For all the above reasons, we are delighted to announce our new technology agreement with OOONA and will be using the latest version of its EDU platform in our upcoming subtitling seminars. It also provides integrations to popular speech recognition and speech synthesis engines, which will allow us to stay ahead of developments in this very exciting market. Onwards and upwards, with OOONA!
