Visual aids have become an integral part of doing business in this day and age. Ultimately, this involves some form of video translation. Business owners and individuals require these services to share their messages or promote products.
Extensive market research indicates that a vast majority of cell phone users tend to share videos. This trend would suggest that a video shared is more likely to garner considerable interest than, say, a text of the same material. This phenomenon would explain why most marketers prefer to use video as a tool of advertisement rather than generic texts. Increased video viewership usually means more brand exposure. This exposure generally translates into more business for those marketers.
Video viewership, however, tends to hit a brick wall. Language barrier becomes a critical hurdle to overcome once businesses or individuals decide to reach a global audience. If viewers cannot understand specific video content, they may not relate to it. Some viewers may need subtitles to enhance their viewing experiences.
At this point, making video subtitles in English becomes necessary.
The following steps are essential to the process of translating a video into English subtitles:
1) Transcription of a Video Translation and its Planning
This stage is not as simple as it seems. Knowing the languages involved in the whole process, the number of translators required, and the transcriber involved are just the basics.
The transcriptionist starts by determining the video content and length. This process requires a detailed video analysis. The analysis also provides additional details about the video, including the overall tone used.
This initial analysis enables the transcriptionist to know how best to create the English subtitles for a particular video. All localization elements to be included are also determined. Localization involves making alterations to the audio text and the translation of on-screen texts. Adjusting the playback speed is also carried out.
Native-level fluency is required. Therefore, a transcriptionist with a good command of the English language needs to handle such a task. The transcriptionist then types the spoken content of the video in a way that is verbatim. Of course, this process is less tedious if the video content in question is transcribed beforehand. Analysis of the audio aspect ensures that the transcriptionist denotes such things as the gender of the speaker(s) and tone of the conversation. The transcriptionist needs to know if the client requires an open caption as opposed to a closed caption.
The transcriptionist has to timestamp the content precisely where the utterances occurred.
2) Inputting Subtitles.
The client and the translator need to come to an understanding regarding the finer details of the job. If the client requires the video to run with English subtitles, the translator needs to know whether he will require close captions. This prior knowledge will enable the translator to approach the task of the video transcription with tact. B The translator’s job begins in the second stage of the project; therefore, a transcriptionist needs to provide a detailed summary of all the necessary information mentioned earlier. As the translator watches the video for the first time, he can then follow the notes to ensure that those notes correspond with the video content.
The translator may then include abbreviations in the subtitles as part of the localization process. The localization ensures that the viewers can follow the subtitles while watching the original video. This last process finally results in a time-stamped text file. At this point, a professional video engineer takes over.
3) Using Special Tools
Because of all the stages involved in producing a video with subtitles, timely coordination of all the processes can become a challenge. This scenario is especially true if the videos that need English subtitles are very many. A translation management system becomes necessary to streamline this whole process. Such a management system can be convenient for multilingual subtitling.
Google Translate is a familiar tool that many people turn to for English subtitling. It’s very beneficial if you need to get a general idea about the video. It can also provide a first draft of text transcription. The text derived can then be used for proper subtitling if a more professional touch is needed.
Processing a video to produce English subtitles ( or another language) depends significantly on the client’s wishes.
Some of the mentioned processes are not necessary for regular videos. A business that requires a promotional video with English subtitles is usually looking to expand. This means that such business enterprises need professional video subtitling.
