idealist.org

Acoustical Liberation: Human Rights in Audio Format

We got wind from the Omniglot Blog about a multilingual online volunteer project that's going on. The goal is to make audio recordings of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights available in 30 different languages. This is how it works: volunteers pick a language that they can read and speak well; then they follow the script and the instructions given to them, and read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights aloud in that language while recording themselves. When they are satisfied with their version, they simply upload the audio file to the LibriVox website, and it becomes available for anyone's listening pleasure.


photo by Flickr user kayray LibriVox is a community of volunteers whose objective is "to make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet." Volunteers, who don't need to have any previous experience, work to record audio versions of chapters and documents, in any language. As long as the work is part of the "public domain" (meaning that no one holds the copyright), it is fair game to become a volunteer project, which means that most books published before 1923 are on the to-do list. Click here to learn how you can get involved in what LibriVox calls "acoustical liberation."