A Captioning Company’s Guide to Translating Subtitles

Translating your videos can be a great idea for a number of reasons. For monolingual content, translation can open up your video content to a wider audience, improve SEO and help spread your message further. For bilingual or multilingual videos, subtitle translation can be a necessity to ensure viewers understand the full content of your video. Whatever reason you require subtitle translation services, there are a number of ways to go about the process. Here, we’ll talk through the process of a Captioning Company’s Guide to Translating Subtitles.

Direct Audio to Text Subtitle Translation 

This subtitle translation option involves a subtitler transcribing and translating simultaneously. For example, for an English video requiring French subtitles, a French linguist would watch the video through, transcribing in French. They would finally provide a video transcript and/or subtitle file in French. This option can be cost effective if only translating into one language, however, it could work out more expensive if working with multiple languages as future translations would also require re-subtitling as opposed to simply translating text.

In addition, where source language subtitles are later required, they would still have to be worked on from scratch or using back translation.

Back Translation of Subtitles 

Back translation is the process of taking text in a target language which has been translated, and translating it back into the source language. If subtitles have been created for a foreign film using direct translation where a source language subtitle file has not been created or has later been lost, back translation can be a cheaper option than fully re-subtitling in the original language.

Source Language Transcription and Subtitle File Translation 

Transcription, subtitling and subsequent translation is the optimal step-by-step process for translating foreign subtitles. It involves a linguist first transcribing audio in the source language, including sound descriptions and extra formatting as necessary. Next, they will work with subtitling to sync text and audio. Finally, they will translate it from source to target language, reworking times, encoding and formatting as required.

Foreign Subtitle Burning Services 

Subtitle burning can be incredibly important when it comes to subtitle translation, especially for multilingual videos. When burning or hard coding subtitles, they will display permanently on a video as part of the image frames. They cannot be turned off or hidden. This is perfect when there are foreign speakers in a film outside of the source language as viewers will require translation to understand the speech.

Foreign Closed Captioning and Caption Editing 

Working with foreign closed captions can include additional formatting, encoding and alterations on source language timings, font styles, meta data and other specifications. Translated closed captions can be provided in a range of languages and can be turned on and off, with viewers able to switch between languages as they choose. Formats typically include EBU-TT, EBU-STL, DFXP and TTML, amongst others…

So there you have it, a guide to translating subtitles from a closed captioning company. If you’re interested in getting a quote from us, visit our quote page and contact us today.