G'day everyone Once again, as with the previous conference, the video presentations on ProZ.com were designed to exclude translators from low-bandwidth countries. A particular gripe of mine is the useless video presentations (or rather, the fact that useless technology is used to present them). I'm sure if you have fast internet, you'd prefer to see a video of nothing more than a talking head, but for those of us with slower internet, there is little more frustrating t... See more G'day everyone Once again, as with the previous conference, the video presentations on ProZ.com were designed to exclude translators from low-bandwidth countries. A particular gripe of mine is the useless video presentations (or rather, the fact that useless technology is used to present them). I'm sure if you have fast internet, you'd prefer to see a video of nothing more than a talking head, but for those of us with slower internet, there is little more frustrating than not being able to follow a speaker's voice simply because the speaker decided to include a large visual component with the file. Take a look at the three largest on-demand videos of this year's conference: The Future of Translation Leveraging Online Translation Marketplaces.flv 133 megabytes, of which 17 megabytes is sound Duration: 35 minutes, plus 75 minutes of silence at the end of the file. The presentation is basically a slide show, with related images used as the slides. In most cases, the images are merely something to look at while the speaker speaks, and do not contain any vital information. In fact, I think this presentation would have had exactly the same value if it was audio-only (except for people whose attention span is short and who need to see a variety of images while listening to a voice). Empower yourself with Machine Translation.flv 112 megabytes, of which 24 megabytes is sound Duration: 51 minutes This presentation is a PowerPoint presentation with voice-over. Most of the slides contain all the text that the speaker is speaking (or: reading), so this presentation could easily have been done by giving the viewer just a text to read. A few of the slides contained workflow diagrams, but most of the slides are not crucial for understanding the presentation. Taming The Thousand-faced Beast Anatomization of Linguistic Quality, Measuring The Opinion into the Fact.flv 91 megabytes, of which 8 megabytes is sound Duration: 17 minutes This presentation is a talking head, and a jerky one at that, with about 3 or 4 slides. If it had been sound-only, with perhaps reference documentation consisting of only the slides (perhaps in a PDF or something), it would have had no less value. Fortunately for me, I was in a high-bandwidth country when the conference took place, so I was able to download all on-demand presentations in a minute or two each. With the previous conference, I was in a low-bandwidth country and I remember that it was virtually impossible to participate in any of the events, even though much of the technology used are perfectly capable of being relayed over a low-bandwidth connection. I think ProZ.com should think about how to include people with slower internet into their activities. Obviously some systems can only be used with high bandwidth, e.g. interactive video streaming, but many other systems can be tailored with a low-bandwidth version. For example, to view these on-demand videos, I had to go through the "lobby", which is a high-bandwidth flash file, but the actual pages on which the videos were embedded were ordinary HTML files. So if I knew the URLs for the video pages, I would have been able to go to those pages without having to load the slow-loading flash intro page that contains the "lobby", which (if we can be honest about it) is nothing more than a page with links, and some animations of people walking a few feet before disappearing and reappearing on the other side of the screen again. I'm tempted to suspect that the flash intro is actually there as a deliberate stumbling block to prevent slow-internet users from getting to the useful content. ▲ Collapse | |