What do you do when you discover a website of interest in your target language, but with no transcriptions for the audio files ?
I know Steve maintains a spreadsheet of websites that people can add to freely, but do LingQ users use this to register their interest in a site where they want SOMEBODY ELSE to do the transcriptions ? Perhaps it could be adapted slightly to allow such “requests”. Then other users (i.e. native speakers) know there is interest in a particular site and are more motivated to do the transcription and upload. So, the whole process is driven by the learner, rather than the native speaker of the target language, in keeping with LingQ tradition !
I would be more than happy to transcribe English podcasts, but don’t have any idea what English learners want ! To randomly select sites (or those of interest to me) just doesn’t motivate me enough to do it, as it could be wasted effort if nobody is interested. However, if someone flagged the site as of interest to THEM, then that’s a different matter entirely.
There is an endless number of websites offering excellent quality podcasts, but without transcriptions. I’m sure we could tap into this resource even more than we’re doing.
Yes, Jamie, this is a good point and I do not know how best to proceed. The spread sheet is not often visited or updated. It is not the ideal way to do this.
I think it may be enough to just mention, on the Content forum, specific podcasts and ask someone to transcribe some of them.
We may eventually get around to creating a “resources” page connected to the import section but that is a ways away.
I can’t find the excel file with websites anymore. Could someone write me the link for it, please?
@Steve
You mentioned the spread sheet is not often visited. Maybe someone else, as me, has had difficulties in finding it. It could be useful to make the link visible in the LingQ’s site (maybe in the Library)
Yes but that is work for someone and our programmers have a lot of things to do. I have put a link to the spreadsheet on my blog but it links to a google document and sometimes permission is required so I am quite confused as to how best to do this now until we can organize something better on the site.
Hi Jamie, to answer your first question I recommend to write to the creator of the podcast. Ask for the allowance to transcribe and share the content at LingQ. That is what I did for a lot of the German podcasts that you could find in the German library. But I did this for my native language, not for my target language.
The difficulty is also to find interesting podcasts. I would love to have podcasts with interesting discussion, good stories (but not old ones) or reports. Interesting topics for me are other countries, nature, ecology, history, science, psychology, self help and, and, and …
I would suggest that if you are interested in a podcast in your native language, there will be others learning your language who will also be interested. If you are waiting for people to tell you which podcasts they would like transcribed, that may not happen. It is also much easier to search for interesting podcasts in your own language.