Mastering Subtitles: Essential Tips for Quality and Accessibility (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: You already know all of that, but adding subtitles is decisive for your content accessibility. With subtitles, you make sure that people out there can listen and memorize the message of your video. However, with great benefits come also great responsibilities, and actually, doing subtitles is more complicated than it seems. Among other things, you need to know how to transcribe, sync together and translate many audio sequences. And that's why there are professional subtitlers. These experts comply to very specific subtitle standards so to provide a quality and reliable service. From their experience, here's 5 best practices that you should keep in mind when doing subtitles. 1. Knowing how to make a subtitle file If you don't use an automatic subtitle solution yet, you need first to create a subtitle file, the most common ones being .srt and .vtt, and that means knowing some basic formatting. You can find a reminder on how to build a .srt file on the post below. What you should remember about this structure is how important it is to choose the right time sequences and syncing them properly with the video. 2. Taking care of your video transcription Concerning word-for-word transcription, there are many recommendations given by official institutions such as the BBC or Channel 4. Let's get quickly through some of the best practices. You should not exceed more than 70 characters per sequence, dividing the sentence into two almost equal lines, the first line being longer than the one below, like a pyramid if you want. That means you should always keep an average of 35 characters per line. You can figure it out by yourself or by using the instructions of your software. To preserve the meaning of the sentence as much as possible, you should cut them logically. Also, you should pay attention to punctuation and especially to the spelling of words. Some words may be not understandable when we listen to them. You might refer to the video context when reading. Homophones, even phonetics, can sometimes confuse you. 3. The challenge of syncing subtitles Syncing your video and speech together can also be a task hard to handle. For starters, you might, for instance, divide your transcription according to the sentences and then cut these sentences one by one to create subtitle sequences. Define your sequences exactly when the speaker starts speaking. If speakers are fast, you can try to remove a few words, but not the words at the beginning or at the end of the sentence. You might also always display subtitles when the speaker's lips are moving. There are actually a lot of lips readers. 4. Taking foreign translations seriously It's very easy to rely on machine translation to take care of subtitles, but you should know that these technologies are still far from perfect. You still need to ask for professional skills to translate your video in languages you don't know. But if you know a language, and only if you know it, here's what you need to know to handle the translation. Do not try to translate a sentence literally. Instead, try to find different expressions that are more familiar to the speaker's tongue. There are languages like Japanese that tend to take up more space than others. Try to adapt their wording by creating shorter and more effective sentences. You might also consider the differences between nations of the same language. For example, the English from the UK is not the same as the English from the US. 5. Considering subtitle appearance You might not underestimate how your subtitles look to the eyes of the viewers. Polished and visually appealing subtitles can help you a lot to get your audience engaged. As a basic recommendation, here's what you should consider. As a general rule, you should always position your subtitles in the center and at the bottom of your video. However, sometimes they may interfere with certain elements displayed on your video, and so you may need to move them to another spot. Regarding subtitle appearance, the most eye-catching subtitles are white-colored with a transparent black background. This format makes them clearly readable for all settings. When choosing your subtitle font, you should opt for classics like Arial, Roboto or Avantika. Also, you should optimize the size of the subtitles according to the size of the different types of screens. On average, 2% of the screen for desktop and laptop computers. So here it is, your turn to do quality captions. Thank you for listening and feel free to contact us for any help or questions.