Our analyst Renato Beninatto did a video testimonial in his native Portuguese, transcribed it, translated it into English and posted it on the web in less than 20 minutes.

When this technology is launched, in December, anyone will be able to go to the dotSUB website, register, and translate the video below into any other language or script, using either the original Portuguese transcript or the English translation as a starting point.

The technology comes at a time where video is in the headlines with YouTube and Yahoo Video, and anybody can produce a short video with a point-and-shoot camera. Add to this mix the dissemination of social networking sites like MySpace and Orkut, and maybe we won’t be following the next war on CNN and regular media, but viewing accounts posted in local languages and translated by volunteers.

For translation companies, this easy-to-use tool may become an additional source of revenue, especially when dealing with training materials and videos on websites.

The current limitations of file size and subtitle style can be easily overcome after the product is launched. The traditionally boring and time-consuming process of time-coding the subtitles is simplified and can be done with a few keyboard commands. In future versions, this functionality can be further improved by allowing the manual entry of time codes, instead of using only drop-downs.

dotSUB handles multiple scripts very well. The fact that all subtitles are centralized, makes it easy to incorporate right-to-left languages like Arabic and Hebrew without much software engineering changes.

We will not be surprised if dotSUB is soon acquired and becomes a feature in video posting sites.

Click below to see the video that we prepared to test the technology.