Amara Captions - Reviewer Guidelines

Last updated by julia.wind 2 months ago

An important part of the Amara Captions process is reviewing the captions that others are writing.

Review Process

Once you have captioned some videos well, the project manager may reach out to ask you to help review captions that other people have written.

If you feel confident in your captions and don’t need to go back too often to fix things based on feedback, feel free to reach out to the project manager and ask to start reviewing!

Here are some basic steps for reviewing:

Go to the Amara Captions Monday board and find the first video that is marked “Ready for Review” that does not have a reviewer assigned.

Select yourself under “Reviewed By” and put today’s date as the “Date of Review”

Feedback should be added as an update in the Monday board .

Click the chat bubble with a plus sign next to the item’s name and write an update in the text box.

Follow these guidelines on sharing feedback:

Review the checklist below.

Please do not fix problems in the videos of others. Instead, consider it a teaching opportunity to help the person identify where they can make improvements and fix them on their own, hopefully avoiding those same errors going forward.

Feedback can be both general (i.e. The timings are off throughout) or specific (i.e. There is a typo at 1:35). If there are similar mistakes being made at different points in the video, don’t list all of them out individually - you can identify the general fix and list the timestamps where the error occurs.

You don’t always need to watch the entire video, but be sure to look at enough of the video so that when the feedback you provide is fixed, the video will be ready.

Once you have completed your review and before submitting your comment, tag the person who did the original video by typing @ and the first few letters of the person’s name, then selecting the right person.

After you are done reviewing, return to the Monday board and mark the “Status” as “Feedback Given”.

The initial editor will look at your feedback, fix the problems, and then mark it as “Ready for Follow Up Review”. They may respond to your comments with questions or their own notes, so make sure to look at the update. When a video you reviewed is “Ready for Follow Up Review”, go through and make sure the editor fixed all the issues.

If there are still some issues you are noticing, give more feedback and mark the video as “Feedback Given” again.

Once you feel the video is done, mark the “Status” as “Complete” and start reviewing another video!

RARE EXCEPTION: If the editor hasn’t implemented the feedback on a high-priority video (for whatever reason) go ahead and do the fixes yourself. Still have another active reviewer check your work off before you publish!

Note: You don’t necessarily need to watch the whole video when reviewing. Most of the time you can watch a minute or two to get a feel of the writing, and then skim through the rest of the captions to look for any mistakes.

Checklist for Reviewing Videos

Here’s a list of things to look for while reviewing videos:

Caption Quality Standard Compliance

Edited or Exact?

If they left in filler words or repeated words, did they punctuate them?

Line Length and Breaks

If there are two lines on a caption, are they about the same length?

Are the lines broken at natural points of speech?

Are names of things on the same line where possible? If not possible, are they broken at natural places?

Unless the sentences are 3 words or less, are sentences separated onto different lines?

Time on Screen

Are captions displayed for the 21 characters/second limit (not orange in Amara)? If they aren't, is there room to stretch them?

Formatting

Are numbers under 10 spelled out?

Speaker Changes/Identification

Did they use the format SPEAKER NAME: text when identifying speakers?

When it’s the first time that someone speaks, did they use a speaker tag?

If speakers are offscreen, did they identify every time that they changed, using either speaker tags or >>?

Non-Speech Elements - Sound Effects - Music

Did they use [sound tags] for important non-speech sounds, like laughing, cheering, or music?

If you’re not sure if it’s important or not, think about what it adds to the video, and if the video would be that different without it. Try watching the video without sound if needed.

Are these tags synced with when the sound starts?

Do these tags last no longer than 15 seconds?

Other Non-Speech

If there are times where it seems like there would be sound but there isn’t any, did they mark it with a [silence] tag?

Grammatical and Spelling Checks

Skim the transcript. Are there any words misspelled?

If you’re not sure, you can click the line the caption is on, and misspelled words will have a red underline.

Make sure that names are spelled correctly. It’s always worth a Google if you’re not sure - things like athletic team rosters are easy to find if you know the year (look at when the video was published).

Are words capitalized only when they’re proper nouns or the beginning of a sentence?

Is their punctuation correct?

Are there periods, question marks, or exclamation points every time the speaker ends their sentence?

Are commas used when the speaker pauses?

Are commas, dashes, or two periods used for significant hesitations or repeating words?

Edited or Exact?

Look for any [inaudible] tags. Give them a listen, and see if you can understand what was said.