Helping with Beey: How we subtitle Ukrainian and Czech videos

Surely you have also been affected by the news about the war in Ukraine. Here at the Beey, our initial reaction was primarily our need to help. In addition to the individual involvement of our team members, we naturally wanted to help collectively: through the technology we develop as a company. 

 First, we focused on Czech citizens who were interested in reliable information about the latest events in the areas under attack. We translated and subtitled some of the crucial videos, such as the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s speeches, or a discussion between a Ukrainian activist and the British Prime Minister. Thanks to our technology, our carefully prepared subtitles were ready to be implemented to the videos and published just a couple of hours after the source material was made public. Initially we uploaded the videos on our own website and YouTube channel but soon we managed to establish cooperation with the Ukrainian Embassy and subtitle videos appointed by them and in their official translation. 

We have also managed to find several Ukrainian editors who are able to navigate the machine-translated text and make corrections based on the original Czech script. In this way, we are able to produce high-quality transcripts and subtitles in very short time; meanwhile, including the newly arrived Ukrainians not only facilitates their integration into our society, but also provides them with some sought-after job positions. 

We have now assembled a professional and efficient team of both Czech and Ukrainian editors who are able to use our technology – especially the Beey editor – to produce high-quality and accessible transcripts and subtitles for both languages in record time. In addition to our long-term cooperation with Czech online television DVTV, which now offers a free section for the Ukrainian population with Beey-made subtitles, we have also launched a new project for Nova TV. In half the required time in comparison to usual procedures, we created Czech subtitles for an original Ukrainian comedy series called Servant of the People. The show stars the current President Zelenskyy and helped him become famous prior to his presidential campaign. For the time being, the show’s broadcast has been launched on Voyo, Nova\’s online TV platform.

These projects resulted in improving our entire process, making us able to offer similar services to ministries, local government and other institutions that communicate with Ukrainians affected by Russian aggression.