How texts and subtitles are created

Transcripts, translations and subtitles – what AI does, what people check and what the notices mean.

Many videos have a transcript of what is spoken, subtitles, chapters and a summary – in several languages. This lets you search the spoken content, read along and follow a lecture even without sound or in your own language.

How a text is created

  1. Recognition: Automatic speech recognition writes down what is spoken.
  2. Clean-up: An artificial intelligence (AI) adds punctuation, removes filler words and corrects names and specialist terms according to our word list. It does not rephrase anything.
  3. Translation: The AI translates the text into the website’s languages – according to a binding translation charter and using the established anthroposophical terms for each language.
  4. Second reading: A second AI compares each translation with the original and corrects errors.
  5. Editorial team: Members of the editorial team review the texts gradually, starting with the most-watched videos.

What the notices mean

  • “Transcribed by AI, not edited” or “Translated by AI, not edited”: The text comes from the AI and has not yet been checked by any person. It may contain errors.
  • Without this notice, a person has checked the text.
  • In the player, the same notice appears in the subtitle selection; on phones and televisions, the track carries the addition “(AI)”. Titles and descriptions translated by the AI are marked in the same way.

The word list

For anthroposophical terms – from “etheric body” to “School of Spiritual Science” – we maintain a list of the established forms in each language: documented in the editions of Rudolf Steiner’s works, on goetheanum.ch and by the anthroposophical movements in the respective language, and progressively reviewed by specialists.

Care with sensitive passages

The AI translates faithfully: it adds nothing, omits nothing and does not sharpen anything. It reports to the editorial team any passages that could hurt a person, a group or a religion or that could be legally delicate. Until a person has reviewed such a passage, the text concerned and the translated subtitles do not appear. The video remains available – and with it the subtitles in the spoken language, so that people with hearing impairments can follow too.

Spotted an error?

Under the text you will find “Report an error”; in the player, in the subtitle menu, “Report an error in the subtitles”. The report reaches the editorial team with the exact location. Thank you for your help!