Sunday, March 23, 2008

Egyptian Baha'i Student on TV

You may watch Cairo's TV program which was referred to in the previous post regarding the Egyptian Baha'i student (Kholoud), who was ultimately allowed to sit for her high school final exams. The program's title is "the Egyptian Street."

Her case is being presented and defended by a prominent Egyptian journalist, Mr. Nabil Omar, who is the vice-president of Egypt's Al-Ahram newspaper. Mr. Omar is not a Baha'i.

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10 comments:

  1. Did you get this document about incidents involving Baha'i school children in Iran, Bilo? What beautiful and courageous people the middle eastern Baha'is and their children are, and how little they deserve to be mistreated!

    http://iran.bahai.us/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/summary-of-attacks-on-school-children.pdf

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  2. Not knowing Arabic, I understood only 3 words of this TV interview: Baha'i, Muslim and computer! What did they say?

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  3. Anonymous-1: Thank you for the link.

    Anonymous-2: You did pretty well!
    I'll try to give you the gist of it when I get a chance.

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  4. I was actually going to ask for the same thing, someone did before: some subtitles :)

    I'll be waiting for the "gist" Bilo :)

    And, btw, Happy NawRuz :D

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  5. Hi Bilo, I love your web site. Don't some Arabic television shows have closed captioning (subtitles for hearing-impaired people)? If a video clip is posted including the closed captioning, then someone who has the necessary software can download the video file, extract the subtitles or closed captioning into a text file, translate the text file using Google translate and then post the translation as a comment on your web page, for example. I'm sure that I have seen a video with closed captioning or subtitles on Youtube or Google video before and the viewer has the option to turn them on or off.

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  6. This sounds like a great option. Any volunteers out there to do this work?

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  7. Here are closed captioned videos on Google video, for example. You turn the text on or off by clicking the "CC" button:
    http://video.google.com/videocaptioned

    First you need to post a video that has closed captions, Bilo, and then make your request for volunteers. I have extracted closed captioned text from videos recorded from my own television (in English though), so maybe I would be able to do it.

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  8. Progress report. I've been trying to extract subtitles/closed captions from videos downloaded from Google Video, but without success. I think that the reason may be that on Google Video the subtitles are in another file separate from the video file itself. I don't know how to download this subtitle file. Videos that I have recorded from television have had the closed captioning within the video file itself, not as a separate file. (But I'm not giving up yet, of course)

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  9. Regarding CC in Egyptian TV, we're far from that. None of our broadcasts are CCed. Let alone that CC works with NTSC only (as far as I know) and Egyptian color system is PAL.

    I would like to highlight an issue that Kholoud mentioned in the show. Even though she was promised that her problem will be solved, the future is bleak for students applying for high school exams next year. The paper form used to apply will be replaced by a computerized one. As a trial for the system students are required this year to fill out the electronic form as well as the paper one. The electronic form has only three choices for religion field: Muslim, Christian and Jew.

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  10. Thank you for the clarification and for pointing out the expected future issues with exam registration. One would expect, however, that--based on the 29 January court verdict--future computerized applications will need to allow for "other" or "--" as with ID cards and birth certificates.

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