Workshop subtitles. Share the lesson with care.

Prepare a lesson people can use after the workshop

A community workshop recording can contain a useful demonstration, spontaneous questions and personal stories that were meant only for the room. Before subtitling it for a wider audience, decide what belongs in the reusable lesson. Polyglot can create, translate and review timed subtitles locally on an Apple Silicon Mac, then export separate SRT or WebVTT files for the approved recording.

W3C’s accessible-events guidance covers workshops and recordings shared afterwards. A replay needs its own accessibility review: someone watching later cannot ask the instructor to repeat a step or explain a gesture. Start with a complete, understandable teaching cut rather than assuming the entire session should become public.

Use recordings and teaching materials you own or have permission to process, edit, translate and distribute. Confirm the agreed audience, destination and languages for identifiable participant contributions. Permission to attend or record a session should not be treated as permission for unrestricted reuse. Creative Commons explains that its licenses do not clear third-party privacy and publicity rights; a licensed worksheet does not resolve every permission in the surrounding recording.

Keep a private contribution decision log

Before editing, review the authorized recording with the facilitator. Make a private note of which instructor explanations, participant questions and demonstrations may appear in the public version. Record the agreed action and its approval status. Keep this note outside Polyglot and share it only with people responsible for the edit; the public subtitles should not contain the review discussion.

If a contribution is not cleared for the intended use, hold that section out of the public cut. Check more than spoken names: faces, voices, name badges, chat overlays and visible worksheets can identify someone. Do not treat deleting a subtitle or replacing a name with “participant” as removing the person from the recording. Resolve the media in a separate editor before importing the final version.

This fictional paper-folding workshop log shows three different decisions. It contains no real participant details and is a planning example, not an app feature or a permission form. The instructor records a fresh explanation when the retained answer would otherwise depend on an excluded contribution.

Fictional private edit log
02:10 folding demonstration
Keep: instructor approved
06:40 participant story
Exclude from public media
07:15 “Yes, like yours”
Replace: new instructor take
Final cut: folding-v03.mp4

Finish the cut before creating subtitle timing

Export the approved video from your editor after removals, replacement narration and any visual redaction are complete. Watch each edit boundary. The demonstration should still show the relevant object and the explanation should make sense without the room’s missing conversation. If the instructor needs to restate a question, record and review that new explanation; do not invent a question in subtitles and present it as recorded speech.

Import that final media into Polyglot and create a source-language draft, or import an existing SRT or WebVTT file that already matches the cut. Correct transcription errors against the actual audio. Check material names, step order and references such as “this corner,” “the other side” and “do that again.” If the instruction relies on something viewers cannot see or hear, return the issue to the instructor rather than silently adding an explanation to the subtitle.

Subtitles from the full session will usually stop matching after sections are removed. A single timing shift cannot repair different offsets caused by multiple cuts. Create or retime the track against the new edit in a suitable tool, then check it throughout. Polyglot preserves the source timing supplied to it; it does not reconstruct a video edit or apply your private contribution decisions automatically.

Review the teaching language and what the recording leaves out

Once the source is reviewed, translate it and ask someone familiar with both the language and the activity to check the result. Preserve action order, negation and references to the visible demonstration. In the fictional folding lesson, “fold away from you” must not become “fold toward you.” Use an instructor-approved terminology sheet as a manual reference, not as a promised glossary-import feature.

Watch the translated text while the hands move. A fluent sentence can still arrive too late for the demonstrated step or take too long to read. Keep essential terminology consistent and review longer translations within the retained timing. If the final video changes, check every language again against the new version.

W3C’s caption guidance includes meaningful sounds and enough speaker information to follow the recording. Polyglot does not automatically identify speakers or create sound-event captions. Review those needs manually; use a caption editor capable of adding individual timed cues when a required interval is missing. Do not attach an unverified name to an off-camera voice.

Captions do not explain silent visual actions by themselves. A facilitator may need to add reviewed narration, a descriptive transcript or another appropriate accessibility aid outside Polyglot. Keep descriptions clearly separate from verbatim speech. A successful subtitle export is not proof that the whole lesson is accessible.

Check the public cut and every file that accompanies it

Watch the entire approved video with each language track in its intended player. Check synchronization at the beginning, around every cut and at the end. Confirm that each step remains understandable, that no sentence refers to a removed contribution, and that captions do not cover the hands, fold lines or other details needed for the activity. Test the small-screen view, pause, seek and language switching.

Before sharing, compare the public delivery folder with the private decisions. Excluded speech or identifiers must not remain in the video, source subtitles, translations, transcript, thumbnail, title or description. Keep private source material and review notes out of that folder. A transcript exported from the original session can disclose material that is absent from the final video; export and review text from the approved cut instead.

Ask the destination which timed format and language files it accepts. For an authorized YouTube version, its help page documents uploading a supported subtitle file with timing. Review the uploaded result. Uploading, access settings and any burned-in caption version are separate tasks outside Polyglot. An unlisted link should not be substituted for the distribution conditions agreed with contributors.

Keep the final video identifier, approved language files and any reviewed transcript together. A later short clip needs its own matching subtitles and permission check. Polyglot processes media and subtitle text locally; requested downloads, user-controlled updates, default-on content-free analytics with an opt-out and Pro licensing have separate network boundaries. New AI subtitle jobs use a seven-day trial and require Pro afterward; editing and exports remain free.

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