Future:Media:Change

It was great to hear today that Livestream are integrating a Plymedia tool that will allow live captioning of their streams, as well as automatic translation and integration into twitter.

This service will be a great addition to LiveStream’s existing options, and will widen the engagement possibilities that channel owners can have with their audience, particularly those have hearing problems or whose first language is not English.

Having worked on many global digital campaigns in the past, choosing how to intergrate language support into projects can cause a lot of heartache at the scoping and design phase. Should you set out to support a set number of languages from the get go, or just translate pieces based on language/geo/regional language.

Most organisations that manage to answer these questions, tend to focus on translating their entire written communications, broadcast style and miss the Web 2.0 conversations that can be just too hard to manage in a multi-lingual format.

I see Livestream’s new tool as great first step, to engaging people in a truly global conversation irrespective of language, alongside with other real time auto translating trials, as included in  Google Wave.

It will be interesting to see how (and which) organisations experiment with these new tools and whether they can facilitate the power of the ideas from their supporters, above the barriers of language and into global movements that will be effective agents of change.