Tech Forum

Im not sure where to share this viewpoint. It's something we as a family have noticed at the past few conferences. They are now allowing brethren and sisters from other countries to give their talks in their own language. However, instead of letting us hear those languages and the beauty of someone speaking the words of Christ in their native tongues, we get a robotic sounding translator reading as if from a transcript. Wouldn't discreet subtitles be better? What's the point of having them speak their languages if we then mute them and speak English over top?

And now you know how others experience conference.

There's a practical issue to open captioning. There's only one video feed - at least for the satellite signal distributed for church buildings. The languages come from using different audio channels. To implement what you're suggesting, the church would have to switch to separate video feeds for each language.

You might look at how the on-line version looks. It's possible they might change that in post-processing to make the on-line version different since each viewer has their own stream.

nellydesign wrote:. . . a robotic sounding translator reading as if from a transcript.

I think there is much room for improvement here, but remember that the thought of translating into English is new with this change in policy. I hope they will get better with time. They do use a transcript, and they are trying to stay in sync with the speaker, but I think those actually doing the interpreting are very new at this business.

As russellhltn said though, while they do broadcast English subtitles in the Conference Center, subtitles in the main video feed to the rest of the world would cause other interference and problems.

One thing I had meant to try was to turn on closed captioning on the stream I was watching. I think that would probably have worked well, but I was busy fighting other broadcast technical issues at the time and forgot.

Still, as you said, the original language audio is turned down so low that you are not able to hear it. And it is that way on the other language broadcasts to which I have listened, Spanish and French.

According to LDS.org, you can listen to talks in their original languages.

Some viewers have expressed interest in viewing English subtitles for talks given in languages other than English. On the Watch Live conference page it is possible to hear the original language audio, accompanied by English subtitles. In the upper right-hand corner of the web page, select the language audio you would like to hear. Then, in the lower right corner of the viewing window, click on the CC icon to enable closed captioning. You will then be able to hear the message in its original language, while reading the English subtitles.

https://www.lds.org/general-conference/ ... e?lang=eng

This is the "Watch Live" page they're talking about:
https://www.lds.org/general-conference/watch?lang=eng

sbradshaw wrote:According to LDS.org, you can listen to talks in their original languages.

This is the "Watch Live" page they're talking about:
https://www.lds.org/general-conference/watch?lang=eng

Thank you very much. That method would be my first preference.

I love the close captions but is there a way to listen to the original audio - like if I was sitting in the congregation at the Conference Center?

michaelfish wrote:I love the close captions but is there a way to listen to the original audio - like if I was sitting in the congregation at the Conference Center?

You can switch your language on LDS.org to the language that is being spoken. So for instance, if the speaker is speaking Spanish, you can change your LDS.org language to Spanish which will cause the Spanish stream to come through. The Spanish stream doesn't have any voiceover on it (since the original content is in Spanish) and then you can turn on English Closed Captions in the player if you wish.

Full details can be found about halfway down on this page: https://www.lds.org/general-conference/ ... e?lang=eng

russelljd wrote:You can switch your language on LDS.org to the language that is being spoken. So for instance, if the speaker is speaking Spanish, you can change your LDS.org language to Spanish which will cause the Spanish stream to come through. The Spanish stream doesn't have any voiceover on it (since the original content is in Spanish) and then you can turn on English Closed Captions in the player if you wish.

Did it once during the afternoon session. There was a link just below the picture to switch to the native language (Spanish).

The only drawback is that the stream was very slow to start in Spanish, so we missed the beginning of the talk.

And at the end, there was no link to go back to English, so I had to change the lang=spa to lang=eng part of the URL. And once again, the English stream would not load on the first two attempts, so we missed part of the next talk.

All in all, it was an interesting experiment, though, especially if the Conference Center was seeing the closed captions at the same speed I was seeing them. They got way behind several times, and then you had to read really fast as they caught up again.

I can envision two laugh cycles in the Conference Center, one for those who understand the language, and another about 15 seconds later when the closed captioning got to the punch line.

I tried a couple of times to switch the CC and was told there wasn't a CC on the feed - I think I was watching on MormonChannel, however.