2D - SDG 4 - Translating Educational Youtube Videos (Difficulty: 2)

CreatiCode

Key Topics Covered

Introduction

The SDGs are 17 goals adopted by the United Nations in 2015. They are a to-do list for everyone to work on together.

This tutorial is related to the 4th goal of “ensure quality education”.

Nowadays, a lot of excellent learning resources are available on Youtube for free. However, most of them are produced in English, so it’s very difficult for non-English-speaking students to learn from them.

In this tutorial, you will create a short translation of the video by Netflix. You can replace the original English soundtrack with your own voice, and also add overlays such as subt*tles and text on the video.

Spanish Version:

Chinese Version:

Step 1 - Add the Youtube Video Player Widget

To get started, please create a new project, remove the “Cody” sprite, and rename the “Empty1” sprite as “Main”. Add these blocks into the “Main” sprite.

It will place the Youtube video widget in the center and cover up the entire stage. This video will be called “video1”, and we will use that name to refer to this video window below.

You can copy the video URL from this video below. You just need to click the “Share” b**ton on its top right, then click “copy link” at the bottom.

Click the green flag, and you will see that the video is loaded but not playing yet:

Step 2 - Start Playing from the 17th Seconds

You can move to any time point in the video using the “seek to” block. In this example project, let’s skip the first 17 seconds of the video, then start playing the video using the “start video” block.

Note that you need to select “video1” from the dropdown in these blocks. It will only show up in the dropdown if you have already added the Youtube video widget to the stage by clicking the green flag.

Now if you click the green flag, the video will be loaded and start playing at the 17th second:

Step 3 - Add a Label for Subt*tle

Next, let’s add a label widget to show the subt*tle of what we are going to say. It will be placed at the bottom to cover up the original subt*tle of the video. Give it a name of “label1”, so we can refer to it later.

Now when we run the program, we get the empty label at the bottom:

Step 4 - Update the Label’s Color

Since the original video has a black bottom, we can also make our label black to hide it. We also need to update its border to 0, so it does not show any border. The default text color for labels is black, which won’t show on the black background. Therefore, we need to update the text color to white. Feel free to change the text color and size as well.

If you don’t see the name “label1” in the dropdown, that means you have not added the label to the stage yet, so you just need to click the green flag to add the label.

Now we can’t tell there is a label anymore:

Step 5 - Hide the Label

We will only need to show the subt*tle when we are adding our own audio and subt*tle, so let’s hide the label widget:

Step 6 - Add a New Sprite “Audio1”

Now we are ready to start adding our own audio track. First, create a new empty sprite named “Audio1”.

Next, send a “start” message from the “Main” sprite after the video is ready:

Next, receive that message in the “Audio1” sprite:

Step 7 - Find the Time Period for the First Sentence

Now we need to find out the starting time and ending time of the first sentence in the original video. It is probably easier to open a new browser tab and open that Youtube video’s address directly.

Play the video until the first sentence from the narrator, which is “Just 50 years ago, we finally ventured to the Moon.” This sentence starts at about 20 seconds, and ends at around 27 seconds.

Step 8 - Record New Voice Sound

Now let’s record a new sound that’ll overwrite the original voice. If you happen to know another language, such as Spanish or Chinese, you can simply record your own voice using that language.

However, if you are not very familiar with any other language, you can still use Google Translate to help you. For example, here is what you need to do to get a Spanish translation:

Open the “Google Translate” website.
Input the sentence “Just 50 years ago, we finally ventured to the Moon.” on the left, and the Spanish translation will appear on the right.
Switch to In the “Sounds” tab of the “Audio1” sprite in your CreatiCode project, and start recording a new sound.
Switch back to the Google Translate page, and click the sound icon to play the sentence in Spanish.
When the sound ends, go back to the CreatiCode playground, and stop the recording.
Select the middle part of the recorded sound, and save it.

Here is a demo of the process:

Step 9 - Wait until the Start Time

Since we will start add our new voice at the 20th second, we can wait for the video to play to that time point first. You can use the “current video time” block to get the video time in seconds, so your program just needs to wait until the time has arrived to mute the video. These blocks can be added to the “Audio1” sprite:

Now if you run the program, the original sound will be muted starting at 20 seconds.

Step 10 - Start Playing Our New Sound

After the video has arrived at the 20th second, we can start playing our recording:

Note that we are using the “start sound” block instead of the “play sound until” block. This way, the program will not need to wait for the end of the sound to start running the next block below.

Now if you click the green flag, you should only hear your new sound, and not the original sound.

Step 11 - Show New Subt*tle

We should show a new subt*tle in the new language to match with the audio. Therefore, you can set the value of “label1” to the Spanish translation. You can copy the translation from Google Translate:

Step 12 - Wait Until the End of the Original Sentence

To make sure the first sentence in the original video is completely removed, we should keep the video muted until the 27th second. We can use another “wait until” block to wait for that time to come, and then unmute the video. We should hide the subt*tle label as well.

Now we are done with replacing the first sentence with our own. This is what you should get:

Note that the subt*tle text is too big to fit into one line, so let’s go to the “Main” sprite, and change the label’s text size from 16 to 12:

Step 13 - Define a New Block “Play Sound”

Since we will be replacing many sentences, we will repeat the logic for replacing the first sentence many times. Therefore, we should “wrap” those blocks in a new block in the “Audio1” sprite. We can call this new block “play sound”, and it needs to take 4 inputs: start time of the sentence, end time of the sentence, the index of the sound recording, and the text to show as the subt*tle.

Once this block is defined, we can use it to play the first sentence like this:

Note that for the “sound”, we specified the number 1, so the system will know we want to play the first sound in the “Sounds” tab.

Step 14 - The Second Sentence

Now let’s try to replace the second sentence. You will find that the original sentence is between the 40th and 46th seconds: “For the very first time, we looked back at our planet.”

As a result, we can record a second sound for this sentence, and add it using the “play sound” block:

Step 15 - 4 More Sentences

We can add 4 more sentences in a similar way:

Step 16 - A New Sprite for “T*tle”

After the first 6 sentences, the video shows a big t*tle “Our Planet”. Let’s add a translated t*tle as well.

You will find this t*tle is displayed between times 80 and 88. So let’s add a new sprite named “T*tle”, and make it wait until the 80th second:

Step 17 - Display the Translated T*tle

Now let’s add another label named “label2” for the t*tle. It will need to use a pretty large letter size, and it will look nice if we give it a transparent background. Again, you can get the Spanish translation of “Our Planet” from Google Translate.

Step 18 - Hide the T*tle

Lastly, when the original t*tle disappears, we should hide the new t*tle as well. So we wait until the 88th second, then hide the new label.

Here is the final demo of the translated video:

Creative Ideas

Needless to say, being able to embed Youtube videos as your project’s backdrop opens the doors to endless possibilities. You can choose different videos, add widgets/drawings/sprites over the video, and change the audio tracks.

Here are some ideas for your inspiration:

Translate the Entire Video as a Team: It is time-consuming to create the translated sound and subt*tles. However, you can work with your cla*smates or friends as a team. Each person can work on a subset of the sentences using their own sprites, and then you only need to import all these sprites (like “Audio1”, “Audio2”…) into one master project. They will work together pretty well.
Translate a Different Video from One Language to Another: You can pick another video to translate from English to another language, or pick a video in a foreign language back to English. See the reference below for some candidate videos.
Change What’s Said: Instead of faithfully translating the video’s audio tracks, you can actually replace them with your own sentences, which can carry completely different meanings. For example, you can make some funny videos by replacing what the characters are saying.

Exerllent Educational Videos on Youtube

This list will be continuously updated.

linkstart||The Bright Side Channel||https://www.youtube.com||/c/BRIGHTSIDEOFFICIAL||linkend
linkstart||The Ted-Ed Channel||https://www.youtube.com||/teded||linkend
linkstart||The SciShow Kid Channel||https://www.youtube.com||/c/scishowkids||linkend
linkstart||The Free School Channel||https://www.youtube.com||/channel/UCebMFnw6WxozGmqGekJHOJg||linkend
linkstart||The National Geographic Channel||https://www.youtube.com||/c/NatGeo||linkend
linkstart||The Kaoru GreenEmerald Channel||https://www.youtube.com||/c/KaoruGreenEmerald||linkend
linkstart||The History of the World Channel||https://www.youtube.com||/channel/UC6xWLK_eSPw5Kk-zlkC8KwA||linkend
linkstart||The Viper TV Science Channel||https://www.youtube.com||/c/ViperTVSciences||linkend
linkstart||The Nat Geo Kids Channel||https://www.youtube.com||/natgeokidsplaylists||linkend
linkstart||David Attenborough Documentaries||https://www.youtube.com||/playlist?list=PLz58QJ68R9CTFoR1J6dgAc4mwdAmm3kZZ||linkend
linkstart||The Khan Academy Channel||https://www.youtube.com||/c/khanacademy||linkend