In collaboration with the Internet Archive's TV News Archive, we are now live-transcribing and translating into English all coverage from Russian channels 1TV, NTV, Russia 1 and Russia 24, Ukrainian channel Espreso and Belarusian channel Belarus 24. Immediately upon the Archive completing processing of a given broadcast, we transcribe it using Google's Cloud Speech-to-Text API and then translate into English using Google's Cloud Translation API using a unique workflow that passes timecode information transparently through the translation pipeline.
The end result is that all broadcasts from those channels will appear in the Visual Explorer within a few hours of broadcast: first in their original language machine transcript and then shortly after that in machine translated English.
We are incredibly excited about the profound new opportunities this makes possible. While imperfect, machine transcription and translation removes the language barrier to at least understanding the general gist of television news from across the world, making it possible for journalists, scholars and mis/disinformation and propaganda experts to understand the realtime narratives emerging about the invasion and report on, study and counter them in realtime.
We'd love to hear from you with any questions about this collection!