Speaker 1: What does my subtitling workflow look like? Coming up. Hello and welcome back to the Freelanceverse. Thank you so much for the support of last week's video. It's been doing amazing numbers. I'm very happy about that because I put in a lot of work so I'm very happy to see that it's appreciated. This week's video is all about subtitling. Subtitling is probably one of my favorite services, if not my favorite service that I do. I do it quite frequently. Actually, almost every day I work on something related to subtitling. Subtitling as a service comes in various different shapes and forms. You might not think of it because it sounds quite straightforward what you do, right? But the way it comes in as a job can actually vary greatly. You can, for example, have a source video in your source language without transcripts. So there, what you would do, you would transcribe the video, you would then translate it into your target language and then you would spot the subtitles. So that's basically the whole process. That's the longest that can happen. Another situation is you already have a video in your target language. So there you would only do the transcription and the subtitle spotting, so no translation involved. Or another situation, you could already have the source video and the transcript and it could be in an online subtitle editor, for example. So you would already have the subtitle spotted. So there basically all you do is translation. So I thought it would be interesting to show you my actual translation workflows based on the two most frequent translation jobs I'm doing. The most frequent subtitling job by far that I'm doing is I'm making SRT files. SRT is the most common subtitle file. It's called, it stands for SubRib Text File. I'm doing SRT files in standard German for Swiss German videos. Swiss German, for those of you that don't know, is quite different from standard German, especially certain dialects can be very different even and very hard to understand for German speakers. Now, when a Swiss company would address their employees in a written form, in a written statement, a letter, a newsletter, etc., it would always be standard German, the normal one with slight adaptations. However, if they address their clients or their customers in a video form, it would most likely be Swiss German because it's more approachable. You want to speak the language of your clients, right? So it's more, you know, it's more appropriate in that case. However, this video then often needs to be translated also into French and Italian because Switzerland is a multilingual, multilingual country. So it very often happens that I transcribe Swiss German videos into a standard German transcript and then I spot the subtitles on the Swiss German videos. So then you would have a Swiss German video with standard German subtitles and these are then used to give to a French, Italian, or even English translator to make the subtitles in different languages. So for the purposes of this video, I made this little video by this snappily dressed CEO here addressing his employees in Swiss German. He's very motivated as you can see. That's usually what I would get and then my job would be to transcribe this and spot the subtitles and type German for my client. So the first thing I would do is I would check the length of the video in order to make an offer to the client to properly be able to offer my services depending on how long it will take. I usually use the rule of thumb of around five minutes of video I can do in one hour because usually these are promotional videos or just videos with a lot of text that's constantly someone is talking, right? These are not documentaries that sometimes there is silence and stuff. But here it's usually five minutes of talking I can do in one hour. Now here I made a very short 30 seconds video so this would probably take me about five minutes to make which means I would never charge only five minutes to my client. That's not worth it for me to open the email to set up everything for five minutes of my time. So this would be a minimal charge for me this job. So the next step I would do is I would transcribe it. So I would open an old-fashioned Word file and the video file next to it and I would transcribe it word for word here on the side. Some people have asked me in the comments actually why don't you do the transcription automatically, right? Just upload this file somewhere and do the transcription automatically. Even YouTube does it. Now there are two reasons. Number one which is very good for me is that I mostly work on Swiss German videos and AI and NLP is not far enough to properly transcribe Swiss German. That's very good for me because it means I will have still for a long long time this job that to transcribe Swiss German text into high German. But even if it did these are usually highly confidential videos that I would not just upload to YouTube for example without the client's permission. It's also my job so I like doing it. I like transcribing because then I can already in the transcription phase kind of slightly change the text so it fits into subtitles because you can't transcribe word for word because people would always say um or they would start a sentence and not actually finish it. They would leave out the verb from the sentence. You know spoken language is very different than written language. So already in this process I have the subtitles in mind. I condense the sentences to the relevant things unless the client says it has to be word for word. It sometimes happens but usually you just have the relevant parts in there. So the first step would be to transcribe this whole thing fully. Okay once the transcription is done you are ready to spot the subtitles because this doesn't need translation right. I want the German subtitles so I open my tool called Subtitle Edit. It's a free to use tool. You can all use it. It's not very fancy but it's perfectly doing the job. It's perfectly fine. If you open this for the first time you should set your settings. So you can go to options up here settings. If you get instructions by the client they are always they always have priority. If you don't get any instructions regarding the subtitles you should use the industry standards. Important is that the single line max here is at 42. The minimum time duration should be one second so 1000 milliseconds. Five seconds maximum. You should use two lines and preferably the top one should be smaller than the bottom one so it creates a nice triangle on the screen that's easiest to read and easiest to look at while you're watching something. Okay for me these are already set. Now I need to close the video because I want to import it in here. Importing is easy. You can simply drag and drop it into this black box on the side. Now the video is in here and then down here in the in the long black box you have the waveform. You need to click in here so it generates a waveform. This is very important to have because it tells you when the subject is speaking or when there is music. You know you know exactly when to start and stop the subtitles. So yeah now you're ready to go. You can start by clicking in here somewhere. Click insert on the keyboard and it enters a random subtitle and then you can just move it around. So you can easily move it to the front because as you can see I start speaking right away here and then you can take your transcript and simply copy and paste. I always go sentence by sentence so I would just copy the first sentence add it into here and then it's of course way too long. I know that already but instead of going back and forth between the work file I just simply put the whole sentence in there and then I split it up and subtitle edit. So you can see it's a single line 182 characters. That makes no sense. That's way too long. We know that we want 42 characters per line maximum so I would always cut this sentence down to under 80 characters now. So that would be probably somewhere in the middle. You always want to keep the same units of cents in the same subtitle. So I would cut this now after. Dear colleagues I hope you had some nice and joyful hours together with your family and friends. So together with your family and friends comes later. So I cut it here at verbringen. I control exit and then I'm still at still too long. I'm at 102. So unfortunately I can't do that. So I would probably just introduce them with dear colleagues and then add the rest after. So with the spacebar you can start and stop and subtitle edit. So now it's important that you listen to the person speaking. When he or me now finishes Kollegen is when you need to stop hit the spacebar to stop the video. Here I already start with the new sentence. So I want to finish Kollegen a bit earlier. So I click around here and I click F12 and it immediately aligns it to where I want it to be. Then I click into the next segment, click insert and I move this as far as I can because I put my my options. I put how much space there needs to be between subtitles right. So if I click insert I move it. I can only move it this close and then I add the next sentence. Make sure to empty the space. So now I have 70 characters per line. So that's perfect to split here after Schöne and then I have 139 and 130. That's perfect. It's not ideal that it's not a pyramid shape but you don't want to cut it before a comma because as again it needs to make sense as a unit right. So this is how you would do it now. Okay now I have all the subtitles in here and then subtitle edit gives you a little warning when something is wrong. So in the text everything is white. So no nothing is wrong. So nothing is too long. If you had a too long subtitles it would be orange here. There is one in the duration, two seconds, that it has a problem. So I double click on it and it immediately goes there and now you can see that the character per second is 24. That's too many. So the subtitle is too short. It should be 22 maximum. So what you can do is adjust it a bit. You can pull it a bit further to the front maybe. Add this a bit back. Change this one a bit. So okay now this one is good but the next one is too short. So you can do the same here. Now they are all okay and now I would suggest you go to the beginning of the video and you watch the whole thing. Not looking at the waveform but looking at the video and actually see how the cuts are. If the subtitles fit perfectly to the video. Now in this video there is no cuts but sometimes there are cuts and the subtitles should not be longer than the cut right. So if the if the cut cuts the subtitle should also change to the next one. So let's watch this this short video quickly together. Now this was a bit too, this is the one I just edited. So I moved everything a bit to the back but now this one comes in too late. If you look, I don't know if you can hear it. I say euch and then the subtitle only appears. So this should come earlier. So I moved this back again where it was before. Now it's good. Now what that means the one before is too short but probably we just have to accept that. Because there is actually a cut. I forgot that there is a cut. So I can't pull this further to the front because it would be before the cut as you can see. It can be a bit earlier. Now it's with the cut so it's perfect.

Speaker 2: This came in a bit too late so I changed it like this. Perfect and you have your subtitle. You save it with ctrl s and you have an srt file that you can

Speaker 1: deliver to the client. The second type of subtitling that I do is when I have to translate it. So usually it's french source text or english source text and then I translate it into german. This I can show you as well but not in an actual real life job because I only do these when I actually get real jobs and it works on the client server. For that I use a platform called Oona. That's the other way I do subtitles. I imported a very short intro, actually the intro of this video to show you exactly what it looks like. But these are just the two tools that I'm using. There are plenty more out there. There is Amara, there is Aggiesup as well, there's Subtitle Editor, Subtitle Workshop, SRTed, many many tools out there. You should just try out which one works for you. Most of them are free. Oona not. Oona is a paid subscription but it's very powerful so I probably will switch once from subtitle edit completely to Oona. But at the moment I only work there for translation related things so I'm not actually doing the time spotting, the time coding of the subtitle. It already comes time coded by the client and I'm just simply translating with the video next to it. Let me show you what it looks like based on an example. Okay this is Oona as a translation platform for subtitles. I use a free trial here on the Freelanceverse because I'm not, I don't want to use my client server of course. So I just uploaded the little intro that I do at

Speaker 3: the beginning of my videos. What does my subtitling workflow look like coming up? As you can see it

Speaker 1: has the source file here. The subtitles are already in so that's how I get my job from my clients and then basically I just do the subtitling on the right side based on the video and the source subtitle. So of course I can't write something very long like let me just write a few letters. As you can see now it's too long and the end here is red and also here in the bar you see that it's red so it can't be that long so I would need to shorten it. Now it's in the green and on the screen you can actually see that it's okay and you could also add a little enter and then you see how it looks on the screen here. So it's very neat what it looks like. Let me just translate this properly quickly. I actually never thought about what coming up would be in German. Los Kids. Let's go. I don't know. It doesn't really translate so I'm happy I'm doing this in English. I would have to think of a very nice solution here. I'm not sure with Los Kids if it's correct but anyways the top you can see we see Man on the Titelungs Workflowhaus. That's how you would translate or that's how I would probably translate it. I didn't give it much thought but then when I have it in one line the question mark would be too long. It's not too bad yet it's just it exceeds 42 characters so in the really worst case I could still leave it like this but I can easily make this two and then you can see here in the picture it looks very good now.

Speaker 3: What does my subtitling workflow look like coming up? And that's how I would export it again into

Speaker 1: an SRT and deliver it to the client or if you work on a server with Oona then it has a whole implementation. I don't know if it actually shows. No it doesn't show on this version but in my server version I can click here on project and then click finish project and then the whole thing goes back to the client as a package so I don't actually need to export anything. There you go. These are the two subtitling workflows I'm using. I'm offering to my clients. I really love this service. I usually charge it by the hour because then I can really spend time on it and especially when you're working on something big like a tv series or a documentary then you really need your time. Let me know in the comments if you offer the service of subtitling as well and thanks for watching. Make sure to subscribe to the channel, like the video. It really helps out a lot especially now that we are riding the wave of last week's video. Thank you so much for being here. I see you next Monday with a collaboration I think. Yes, see you there. Bye bye.