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For an international congress I have been tasked with organising translations.

Speakers will host presentations in different languages.

The translating bit itself seemed to be resolved, but we would like to be able to project the translations as a subtitling on a projection screen.

In effect, when a speaker says a sentence, a translator will use a speech-to-text conversion to obtain a written, translated text.

Then we would like to use a tool that can project this text (live copy and paste by the translator) onto a screen.

Most tools (like subtivals, gnome-subtitle, etc) are focused around creating *.srt files that than can be used to be played alongside a video. This is not what we are looking for, as it requires creating the srt-file first and then projecting it. We'd want to be able to project subtitles as the speaker is doing his presentation.

I'd be grateful for any pointers, thoughts, work-arounds that the community might offer!

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  • Have a look at the program osd_cat, or it might be asod_cat, it can display text onscreen and you might be able to use a script or pipes | to take the output of your program to put in this one
    – Mateo
    Dec 14, 2014 at 14:21
  • Do you know which speach-to-text or what program is doing the translation, or maybe a sample of output from the program, it could help to find a solution to displaying the output from the translation
    – Mateo
    Dec 14, 2014 at 14:43
  • You might be able to swing something with webcamstudio and an irc channel overlay? See: sourceforge.net/projects/webcamstudio
    – jmunsch
    Dec 16, 2014 at 13:29

1 Answer 1

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You might be able to use live text overlays. Basically, your STT software feeds into the translator which feeds into something that displays text live to the screen. I can think of an efficient (?) way to do this.

  1. Create a file for your translation software to write text into. (In this demo, it's called translated.txt
  2. Set your translation software to output things line-by-line to this file. Optionally, make it so each newline has a > and the language in front of it, like so:

Input text: Hello World!
Output text: BT> Smit Binuid! (where BT is the language double-code (Besten-Tram, a language I just made up)

  1. Now use a terminal with tail -f translated.txt. The terminal output will follow the text, displaying it as it's placed into the file live. Resize the terminal to something better, and then change colors if need be.
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  • This could work, combine with a transparent background and no window decoration, I'll try to find that question.
    – Mateo
    Dec 14, 2014 at 13:30
  • askubuntu.com/questions/449711/… here it was, just change the font and you have a custom overlay system ;)
    – Mateo
    Dec 14, 2014 at 14:01

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