Category Archives: Mozilla

Bengali subtitle project for MozMovies

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Hope you have read my blog on “How to spread the word of Mozilla”[0]. As I mentioned in my blog, movies or videos (motion pictures ;)) are very important and effective way to share thoughts and views with your audiences, locally or remotely. It makes impact to your audience bigger / greater then other medium like printed hard-copies/soft-copies of handouts or verbal talks. There is no chance to loose or miss any information when your are delivering your ideas through a movie – which is rehearsed, recorded, edited and finalized. It is handy, easy to transport and share. You can treat your audiences regardless the location homogeneously and motivate them equally by broadcasting the same movie or video to all.

But it creates more impact when this tool is equally accessible to all. In this digital era, Language is one of the major barier for easy access to information. Suppose you may play a movie to a group of people. But if the language of the movie is different from your native one. The movie may not absorbable to EVERYONE equally. The movie may not create equal impact to all as intended. It is very important to dub the movie in your native language to achieve the impact. But, what if you are not producer of the movie. The way to get your desired results is making subtitles for the movie in your native language, Bengali.

Mozilla has lot of movies[1][2] to inform, teach and motivate. You know things, learn ways, feel motivated and be proud for Mozilla by watching this movies, because you have another expertise beside your eye-sight and hearing capability – knowledge of English. Imagine, If you want someone within your friends-n-family or your countrymen, who don’t know English (or as good as you) to be in the same position like you, how that can be done with these English movies? You need to translate the subtitles into Bangla for them.

After becoming a Mozilla Rep, I wanted to start some activity for the general people and planned to introduce Mozilla Bangladesh to a new project. I thought of few ideas and came up with this activity, doing Bangla subtitles for Mozilla movies. I’ve open a etherpad[3] to list all the movies that we should make Bangla subtitles. If you think any Mozilla movie is good for the community but not in the list, feel free to contribute with appropriate links.

To start with the project, I am proposing to subtitle the renowned mozilla movie “Code Rush”. I’ve opened another etherpad[4] to coordinate the subtitle translation work for “Code Rush”. You’ll find the details about the movie, how to translate and some general instructions in that pad. Now I would like to invite you all who wants contribute for Mozilla and the community to join this translation work. Just sign your name at Distributions of translations section and follow the How to. Let do something not for ourselves or not for shareholders of some giant/evil company, let’s work for the country and for our great language.

Spread the words of Mozilla

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Internet is an integral component of modern life now and its going to become a culture of human society. Also being a Mozillian I believe that Mozilla is an alternative for me to survive in this virtual world. We believe that the internet must be a public resource and the public resource must me open to all. It is my right to use or access a public resource like air, light or internet. It is very important to aware your family, friends, your colleagues and everyone around you about their rights and the ways to retain the rights. That’s what we need to do and what we are doing exactly this works as member of Mozilla Bangladesh community.

But Mozilla and Mozilla Bangladesh does not have the advertising budget for this work. and the hundreds of millions of users of Mozilla software have, (in almost all cases) found out about it by word-of-mouth, through their friends, family and acquaintances. Mozilla is all about the users, we prefer to connect and have conversations with them.

There are some simple ways to contribute to this job:

Other effective ways to contribute and spread the words of Mozilla to the local (Bengali) people:

  • Translate mozilla related English Wikipedia articles into Bangla language and post them at Bangla Wikipedia. Or you can improve an existing article at any version of Wikipedia. Share the articles with your communities.
  • Movie is a very effective way to transmit your words to others. Mozilla has hundreds of movies about it’s history, activities, new products at youtube.com and other sites. You can easily make subtitle of these movies in Bangla language through amara.org share them, so that people in your communities can easily access these movies and get inspired.

In populated country like Bangladesh we need a large workforce and massive contributions  to educate the vast population in the country about their rights and alternatives. We need radical strategies, innovative ideas and collaboration to achieve our goals. So let’s collaborate and contribute to mozilla.