Hi, my name is Alastair Cole.
I'm a documentary film maker based here in Scotland.
It's a pleasure to be here today to celebrate
International Translation Day 2017,
and to talk to you about Amara as well,
which is, of course, a wonderful platform for subtitling and translation.
As part of my role as a filmmaker,
subtitling and translation is such a pivotal part to what I do.
Specially at the moment, I'm making a film about languages,
about the subject of language,
including a recent project, a feature documentary project
called, "The Colours of the Alphabet",
which I'm going to talk a little bit about now,
because translation and subtitling have been so pivotal and so fundamental
to help this film made.
Those in it, those with me in it,
without them I wouldn't have been able to have made the film.
The film is a feature documentary,
it released last year at the Glasglow Festival,
and it's been turned around festivals and cinemas
around the UK, in Europe and Africa, since then.
It's the story of three children in a village in Zambia,
in a village called Lwimba.
It's a story of language and politics in education, if you want, and childhood.
It follows the children for 12 months at their first year of school.
And there's a school in the community,
where the community speaks one language called Soli,
the region and the teacher speak another language, called Nyanja,
and they all must learn English,
because English is the only official language of Zambia,
despite being 72 languages,
and only less than 2% of the population speak English at home.
So, of course, it's a film about this political dynamic,
but at the same time, it's a film about childhood,
and it's funny, and it'a film that, hopefully,
we can all relate to at times,
and it reminds us of those days at schools and their difficulties,
but of course,
for someone that is going to school in a different language completely,
these difficulties are really highlighted and exasperated, if you want.
But in the film-making process, subtitling and translation is fundamental.
We used multicolored subtitles in the film
to represent the changes in the languages that are going in the classroom
and somewhere like Zambia.
This multilingualism is incredible, it's very impressive, but of course,
conveying it to a non-indigenous African language speaking audience
is often difficult, and it's often not taken as a priority.
But for us it was a priority, so we used,
a creative approach to subtitling, if you want, in the film,
as you can see in the teaser it, at the end of this video.
Soli, one of the languages, is orange, has orange subtitling,
Nyanja has green subtitling, Bemba has ping subtitling,
and English has white subtitling.
And this technic has foster more conversation
and hopefully, a greater understanding that this multilingualism that exists,
this beautiful multilingualism that exists
and the complexities and the skills,
which so many people across the continent embrace this.
And I suppose, within the documentary more broadly,
subtitling and translation is so important
and my team for this film is what I talk about.
My team of subtitlers and translators in Zambia, [3:04]