Removing all barriers to communication between diverse cultures

Gaultier, De Caunes Photograph: C4

Brian Butterworth published on UK Free TV 28th March 2019 at 15:17

One thing I have discovered is that this is the system that YouTube uses to add subtitles to very video on that service.    It’s around 99% accurate, so it works well.

It got me thinking of two TV shows.

First is MEURTRES AU PARADIS.  

Which is, of course,  top BBC show Death In Paradise.    It is interesting to see a TV show that is made for concurrent broadcast in English and French.  So I am reminded of Eurotrash, a TV show which did the a rather remarkable job of not using normal British regional accents to overdub the videos gathered from around Europe.

Joe Events said in Broadcast:

“Some of the format devices were really sharp: contributors dubbed with regional British accents wasn’t just comedy gold, it broke down monolithic foreign stereotypes. I understood that there weren’t just ‘French’ people: Marseille was probably was quite like Liverpool; that Parisians were cockneys. And above all that everyone, everywhere was basically the same: rather wonderful and rather flawed”

Not just monoglot UK and US-made dramas  

So, we can transcribe any audio using a simple API call.   We can translate this to any other language using another Google Cloud Translation API call.   

So, rather than Water Presents-style subtitled access to non-UK and non-US drama: redub the video  of all non-English TV shows with Eurotrash style.

All this needs is another API call from Google!   

What could possibly go wrong?