Obama en Español: PBS brings SOTU to the world

Only hours after President Obama delivered his State of the Union speech, it was already available online with subtitles in seven different languages, including Japanese, Arabic and French. Additional translation efforts for Spanish, German and Korean versions of the speech are currently underway. The multi-lingual captions are the result of a partnership between PBS Newshour, Mozilla and Universal Subtitles, which collectively received $400,000 in funding from the public broadcaster a few days ago.

Aside from making the speech available in other countries, the captioning is also meant to make it more accessible to viewers within the United States that primarily speak a different language, as well hard-of-hearing viewers. The Newshour team is working with professional translators on some of the subtitles, while others are collectively done by volunteers through Universal Subtitles’ online tools.