Radio Canada International (RCI) has launched a redesigned website that includes a full section in Punjabi, in addition to those already available in English, French, Spanish, Arabic and Chinese. The site also now includes the option to read content in traditional Chinese with a new section in Tagalog (the language of the Philippines) to go live in the next few weeks. RCI now appears on the home pages of CBCNews.ca and Radio-Canada.ca and will draw mainly on translations and adaptations of articles curated from those sites. It will also be incorporated into the CBC News and Radio-Canada Info apps, in addition to making its content freely available to interested multilingual media outlets. RCI is also introducing a weekly podcast featuring the top Canadian stories for foreign audiences in different RCI languages and reports from the field in Chinese, Arabic and Punjabi. The public broadcaster says these moves will substantially boost RCI’s visibility and propel the multilingual news service to become more agile and relevant, “in step with a rapidly changing country and world.”
Bev Standing, a Welland, ON-based voiceover artist, is suing the parent company of TikTok for allegedly using her voice without permission. Standing has filed the suit against China-based ByteDance, in a U.S. court for violating copyright. She alleges that when TikTok debuted its text to voice conversion tool last fall, a computer-generated version of her voice became the default voiceover for TikTok content generated using the text-to-speech feature in North America.
so.da, Corus Entertainment’s social and digital agency, is launching five new original series starting this month, producing serialized content in-house on topics from baking to sex education. The five new original series include: Food Network Canada: Baking Therapy (8 x 5-10 mins); HGTV Canada: Plant Mama (6 x 5-10 mins), led by resident plant expert Amanda Roberts; HISTORY: Canada Uncovered (4 x 4-6 mins), a four-part docuseries hosted by Global News anchor Farah Nasser that investigates Canadian histories left out of textbooks; SHOWCASE: Queens of Cosplay (4 x 4-6 mins), hosted by Canadian drag royalty Kyne (Canada’s Drag Race) and Baby Bel Bel (Miss Crews & Tangos 2019); and SLICE: Sex Sessions (10 x 3-5 mins), with sexual health and consent educator Samantha Bitty.
