Human Rights Watch has been a major leader in documenting and spreading awareness about human rights abuses around the world, and as part of their work, they have created original video and photo works that communicate their messages. Photos can speak for themselves, but videos need to be translated for a global audience to appreciate them, and video production is expensive. For its new website, due to debut in Fall 2008, Human Rights Watch needed an effective way to translate online videos into other languages. Unfortunately, there were no good online tools available to do this affordably.

Using the open source video application JW Player, we built a custom video solution that allows Human Rights Watch to host videos on its own site instead of using YouTube or another third party service. By combining the strength of the video player with Drupal’s multilingual tools, we built a toolset that lets staff write multilingual closed-captions and synchronize them with videos via the website. This solution helps them on two levels: not only does it make multilingual video easy and affordable, but it also greatly improves the website’s search engine ranking. The translations will be visible to Google since they are being written within the CMS itself, and therefore Google’s spiders will crawl this multilingual content.