In our first article « 4 reasons why you need to translate & caption your video », we gave you (we hope) good reasons to subtitle your videos.
The next step? The implementation… which is less easy!
Here is the equation to be solved: how to transcript your video into its original language, then quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively create multilingual subtitles? And needless to say, with a professional result…
Let’s have a look at the kind of professional solutions that can be found on the market.
Transcription (also called « speech-to-text »): the most obvious solution is humans playing back the video and typing out the words they hear.
It means a lot of time and effort spent: a professional transcriber will work between 5 to 8 hours to transcript 1 hour of audio content (depending on the quality of the audio, the speaking rate, the number of people who are talking, the topic…).
Not only that, but when talking about video, you also have to synchronize the text with the image, and thus adjust timecodes. Other important point: the subtitles frame, which has to be adapted (one or several lines) to ease the reading.
Transcription is definitely labour-intensive for post-production teams, journalists…
Once done, the translation step can start, from the transcription file (that’s why the quality of the speech-to-text is so important since it’s the base for translation!).
Once again, the human solution is the first one that comes to mind: collaborate with one or several professional translators, who will work from the transcription file.
Timecodes have to be managed again, and adjusted according to languages to align the spoken speech with image (less words are used in English than in French for example).
What are the benefits of a human solution? Obviously, a quality and accurate work, both on speech-to-text and translation.
The main cons? The time, since the whole process involves stop-and-start playback of the media files, and budget
A simple internet search provides a wide range of transcription and translation tools, from consumer tools to more professional solutions.
It’s tempting to think that a software can completely replace the human work and avoid your team a time-consuming work of transcription and translation! But let’s face it, miracles solutions, which provide an automated and cost-effective quality result… well, it doesn’t exist yet.
Quality. That’s the key word. Even the most efficient and accurate automated solutions can’t, for example, contextualize a text.
It can, however, provide a basis to work on and make your team save time. But either way, we need to give people the ability to correct and validate the content.
All this leads us to a third option, which combines best of both world.
A few years ago, there was room for an innovative collaborative Saas solution to easily add subtitles to videos, as nothing really efficient was able on the market.
So, we did it: Eolementhe was born in 2014, and now includes a mix of automated tools and human actions to transcript, translate and subtitle a video (120 languages), through an intuitive interface, usable by anyone. And cost-effectively, of course.
To understand how Eolementhe allows to easily add multilingual subtitles to a video: watch the video below!
