Smog Thick

Smog Thick

Running at 104 minutes, shot like a TED talk and with echoes of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, Chai’s film discusses the damaging impact of pollution on health, and she discusses how her own infant daughter had to have an operation straight after birth to remove a benign tumor.

“This is a personal issue between me and the smog,” Chai says in the movie.

The movie has reached more than 200 million views on Chinese websites, not counting Wechat or other social media, which makes for nearly one-third of China’s online population of 649 million.

One thing the internet is still not good at, relative to the effort it expends on all kinds of other things: translation of extremely common human languages. You don’t have to be generous with “Wechat or other social media” to conclude that Under the Dome has been viewed at least partially by an incredible number of people over the last four days, or to conclude that it is a historically significant document. But there doesn’t yet appear to be a full English translation available, and the responsibility of creating one has fallen to a student’s crowdsourcing project.

Hello!

I’m Linghein, and I’m a grade 12 student in Mainland China.

Tianyu(@tianyuf) and me start to translate this movie form the morning of Mar 1. We translated slowly because of the long time of this movie. We need your help.

I cut the video into several parts, you can choose one part to translate.

We suggest you to get Chinese subtitles form the movie and translate it directly.

The subtitles currently cut off at about nineteen minutes, which represents ~three days of translation.

This will get done, the system will work, etc. But maybe not until the American news cycle is done with the story? Just a reminder: The world’s internet does not really fit together at all.