Yu's Third Paper
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Contents |
Analysis of Dailymotion
Introduction
I have selected a video sharing website called Dailymotion and used the Hallidayan framework to analyze its field, tenor, and mode. Dailymotion is a multilingual website, which allows users from all over the world to share their videos with others in their own languages. This is also a social networking website, because users can connect with one another by adding others to the contact lists, posting comments on videos and making playlists of favorite videos. I chose this website to analyze, because I was interested in its multilingual and international discourses. In this website, users can see comments written in different languages at the same page very often. The videos are also from various countries in different languages. Moreover, it contains several versions of other languages besides English, which allows users from all over the world to use and join this website easily.
Field
This website was created by Benjamin Bejbaum and Oliver Poitrey in France. According to the “About” page, the goal of this site is to find “new ways to see and share the world.” In this website users can browse videos, post their own videos to share privately or publicly, and participate in groups where people upload videos according to common interests or specific themes.
Users all over the world can browse the videos by searching keywords, channels or groups. It is not necessary to create a user account to watch the videos. The tags of each video serve as keywords, for which users search. If a tag is searched and viewed frequently, the letters of that tag will become bold. Therefore, users would know which tags are popular. Users can also use channels to find a video. Channels are divided by different genres of videos such as movies, music, business, news, schools, family, travel, games, sports and so forth.
In order to upload videos, people have to create a user account, which is free. The videos have to be under 150MB and shorter than 20 minutes. Only the users who registered as a Motion maker can upload videos without any limit. When uploading videos, users put tags on each video, which act as the keywords for other people to search. The more tags a video has, the more chances it can be found and watched by others. Users can also specify to which channels their videos belong, so that viewers can find the videos from the specific channels. For example, if a user wants to upload a video from his trip to Hawaii, he can make tags like “Hawaii, beach, travel, summer”. Also, he can put this video in the “travel” and “lifestyle” channels. Moreover, after uploading a video, each user can choose whether to show it to the public or only to specific users like family and friends.
Registered users can not only upload videos, but also invite other users to their contact lists, add favorite videos to the playlists, and leave comments on someone’s videos. Each registered user has a page called myspace, on which they can modify their profiles, upload videos, add contacts, and add favorite videos.
Moreover, users can create and join groups in the website, where people with the same interests gather and post their videos. The groups can range from anything such as pop culture, Asian music to animations and so on. All registered users can create any type of groups.
Dailymotion also has a function which allows users to create links to the videos from their blogs or websites. If users find a particular video or a group of videos interesting and relevant to the contents of their blogs or websites, they can use the features called “jukebox” or “videoroll” to make a link, so that others who see their blogs can view the videos uploaded in Dailymotion. The “jukebox” is a link to a particular single video clip, while the “videoroll” is a link to a group of videos.
Tenor
The main participants of this website are the users from all over the world. The intended users are anyone who is interested in browsing or posting videos. The site manager is the Dailymotion team, which consists of the two founders of the site and many other programmers and designers. The site managers created the “About”, “Legal”, “Prohibited Content”, “Copyright” and “Privacy Policy” pages. However, all of the other content on this website have been created by users. The site managers do not screen the videos which have been posted. Therefore, the users seem to have the most control over this site.
There are two kinds of users in the website: the unregistered users, who only watch the videos, and the registered users, who upload videos. On one hand, unregistered users can have access to all kinds of pages and videos by searching the keywords. They can watch all of the videos, see the groups and see different channels. However, they cannot change or post their own videos, make or join groups, nor post comments on the videos. On the other hand, registered users can upload any videos they want. However, if other users see that some videos are not appropriate (including copyrighted materials, violent, illegal or sexual contents), they can always report it to the web managers. Registered users have their own page, and they can add other people’s video as favorites to their own playlists or add other users as their friends. Moreover, they can make a new group or join existing groups, and they can also post comments and messages to the videos posted by others.
If someone wants to upload a video which is more than 20 minutes, he has to be registered as a Motion maker. A Motion maker is a creative user who has no limit to the length or the file size of videos. Even though this is also free, a Motion maker must be registered under the category of musician, filmmaker, entertainer, or journalist. Their videos will be featured on the homepage. Also, the videos of Motion makers are screened and evaluated by the Dailymotion team, and they have to meet the standard as a Motion maker in order to maintain their accounts.
Dailymotion also plays a role as a social networking website. Registered users can interact with one another by adding others as contacts, adding the videos to their favorites, posting comments on others’ videos, and rating and voting for videos. Once they add someone as a friend, they can see what has been updated by the person from their own myspace page without going checking their friend’s page. However, Dailymotion does not have a personal email or message system yet. Therefore, users can only communicate with one another by leaving comments on other people’s pages. All of the postings and comments are open to the public. Users cannot choose to make the messages private or public. On the website, the staff mentions that they are currently developing a system to let users send private emails or messages to each other.
Mode
This website has various versions in different languages. The languages include English, French, German, Italian, Swedish, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Turkish, Danish, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. English is used as the main language, because many users seem to post the descriptions of their videos and comments on other videos in English, even though they are not from an English speaking country. Moreover, tags are mostly in English. If I changed the website to another language, I can still see mixtures of English and the other language. For example, in the Japanese version, there is no Japanese translation for the Help section, For example, even though the questions are written in Japanese, it says there are no answers available in Japanese, so the answers are all written in English.
However, even though English is the dominant language in the texts of this website, many videos are not in English. There are videos in various languages such as French, Spanish, Korean, Japanese and so forth. I have found some Japanese videos with Chinese subtitles but no English subtitles. Videos in foreign languages are usually clips from dramas, movies, or music videos. However, creative videos made by users are mostly in English.
In Dailymotion, the texts are mainly the spoken language. Since the main feature of this site is video clips, the texts are mostly used to support the videos. Therefore, the amount of videos and images are much more than the amount of texts in Dailymotion. The texts also play a role allowing people to communicate with one another. However, most of the interactions are informal and conversational. For example, many people post very short sentences in their comments, such as “Thank you”, “Great”, and “Good Job”.
In the English version, the register is targeted to all users, especially in colloquial forms. The vocabulary is mostly Standard English. However, under different tags and channels such as music, cartoon, or sports, there are some technical terms that can be understood only by people who are familiar with these genres.
Even though there are different versions of languages, it seems that many users use English to write the introductions to their videos or to post comments on other people’s videos. When the site is changed to a foreign language other than English, the outside template is changed into the particular language. The template includes the buttons such as Home, User, Tags, Groups, Help, About Us, and the names of the channels like music, sports, traveling, and funny movies. However, the description of each video and people’s comments remain mostly in English. I have seen many videos which have comments in both English and another language. Many of the users are not English speakers, so the English written by the users are sometimes not grammatically correct. But since the sentences are usually short and conversational, it can still make meaning even if the English is not correct.
Containing multi language versions is one of the main characteristics of this website, but I have found one problem in writing tags in foreign language which is not alphabet based. For example, some Japanese soap operas contain tags written in Japanese. However, the Japanese tags are not shown correctly on the page. It seems that there is a coding problem in tags, and users cannot really use characters which are not alphabet to make tags. However, there is no problem in writing descriptions or comments in Japanese.
Conclusion
Generally speaking, Dailymotion functions well as a multilingual video sharing website, because it allows users to upload videos and write in various languages. The videos are also in different languages, which allow people from all over the world to view and enjoy. However, English seems to be the dominant language of this website, since it is used as the shared language for users. People from the same country usually comment on one another in their native languages, but people from different countries use English as a common tool to leave comments and communicate with one another. Therefore, we can see the mixture of English and other languages very frequently in Dailymotion. However, Dailymotion still has minor problems such as coding errors in foreign language versions. They need to fix this problem in order to let non-English users be able to use this site more easily. Moreover, if they establish a system to send private emails and messages, Dailymotion will be more accessible as a tool for networking.
References
Halliday, M.A.K. (1985) Language, context and text: Aspects of language in a social-semiotic perspective. London: Oxford University Press.
Dailymotion. Retrieved June 10, 2007, from http://www.dailymotion.com/
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