Video subtitling has come of age

Long gone are the days when poor quality subtitles were a distraction and reduced your ability to understand – and enjoy – a video. Advances in technology have significantly improved the quality of subtitles and captioning, making it almost effortless to localize a video across almost any language. 

Here we speak to Mark Maguire, Production Director within RWS’s Marketing Solutions team, about his role, how he works with customers on their subtitling projects and where the industry is headed. 

Tell us about your role

My role in RWS’s Marketing Solutions division has focused on looking at the latest technologies and production processes specifically in the MarTech space of our industry. Over the last 4 years I have enjoyed working with so many individuals across the business and regions – but more recently I’ve worked closely with project managers and sales teams to qualify and support opportunities and find ways to add value in the client engagement process. I love to talk to clients to hear first-hand how they work today and collaboratively find ways to address either their known or perceived pain points in any given marketing process. One big area that I’m currently focused on is captioning and subtitling – helping customers to find simple ways to share their library (and future) videos with a wider global audience. 

Why should companies consider subtitling their videos?

Over the last year clients have expressed the pressures of pent up demand to share video content with a wider audience across different devices. Subtitling content – across multiple languages – is the best way of doing this. You can instantly reach a global audience with your existing content.

It’s also worth noting that the majority of content consumers watch videos on mute – particularly on social media where as many as 85% of videos on Facebook are watched with no sound. If you want your message to get across, it’s worth adding subtitles – even if it’s in your native language. But once you decide you want to subtitle your videos, you need to firstly have a native transcription service that turns your audio files into text. It’s a big challenge.

Before the transcription is translated, the source text needs to meet quality assurance expectations: Brand, acronyms, product names all have to be taken into account, and thus it must be fit for purpose prior to translation.

Having a quality transcription and translation service available quickly allows marketing departments to release and repurpose their messaging across different mediums to new markets and audiences. 

How does it work, what do I need to do?

What we are seeing today is clients struggling to cope with demand because they simply lack the resources in their respective departments. Some companies just have three people in their marketing teams. How can you expect a team of this size to subtitle hundreds of videos across dozens of languages – without impacting their day jobs? The clients I have been speaking to have expressed the need to reduce turnaround times as the first priority, maintain QA as the second, and lastly, ensure they remain competitive in the market place.

Our objective is to make life easier for our clients, to take the heavy lifting of administration wherever possible. So, as an example, we provide clients with designated areas to drop content into our workflow, or they send us URLs to ingest the content more efficiently from their own platforms. 

One area that we have seen the biggest amount of traction is when a client has Brightcove as their video platform. We’ve have hooked up numerous clients’ own Brightcove libraries to our own CaptionHub platform where we seamlessly pull in videos for processing. Once the video is pulled in we use the Speechmatics v2 engine to carry out the transcription – which rates at 90% accuracy. From there we run a post edit clean-up to address any quality issues, and with custom dictionary support (for brand, product names, etc.) we help clients achieve the quality level they expect. And once the transcription is approved we push it through our translation process. Once the translation is approved, we have multiple output options open to us; output SRT, burn the subtitles into the video, or with one click we push the subtitled tracks straight back to the original video on Brightcove.

What kind of results can customers expect?

You would need a small army of content creators, video producers and engineers to subtitle large volumes of videos. It’s simply not realistic for companies to do all this in-house. We take all this work away from them, and by integrating our technology with third party systems we’re able to handle any volume of video localization. Our customers typically benefit from a 50% reduction in turnaround time (particularly when using the Brightcove integration) for subtitling videos – with no extra resources required.

What does the future look like for subtitling?

Of course, as automation becomes more and more possible, with increased platform integrations, we will see further benefits in turnaround times for all stakeholders involved. Plugging Language Weaver into engines like CaptionHub will improve the quality / consistency across wider content types. Demand for live streaming is also growing exponentially and customers are looking for new solutions that combine the best machine translation engines, with reduced latency, and the ability to edit content in a live environment. Whether that be for Teams or Zoom calls or indeed streamed company events.

In addition, post editing the live content and providing quality subtitled tracks will also help meet demand for reuse of the content. I believe RWS providing a fully managed Service will help clients deliver quality multilingual content across global audiences.

Click here to learn more about our subtitling services.