Speaker 1: What's the deal with subtitling? I'll share my experience in this video, coming up. Hello and welcome back to the Freelanceverse. This week's video is about probably one of my favorite services I offer, it's subtitling. Video content is, has been and is still extremely popular, especially also nowadays in the corporate world. It's becoming a very important tool of communication, because people can't go into works, all right, so you still need to communicate with your employees and instead of writing boring emails, people do it now often with video content. And me being from Switzerland, a multilingual country, a lot of these videos have to be subtitled in all the national languages. So I work with this content actually quite a lot recently. So I planned out this video and I really wanted to make sure to structure it in a way that you can follow it easily and understand it. So I'm going to split it into different parts. I'm going to look at different aspects of subtitling, I'm going to look at the requirements, the skill sets that is needed to do this service, common content types I'm gonna look into and also the basic displaying principle of subtitling. And to finish off the video, if I have enough time, I hope so, I will give you a quick demonstration with the tool that I'm actually using to show you what I'm actually doing when I'm subtitling. I think that might be insightful. In fact, before we get into it, make sure to scroll down and subscribe. My goal is to reach 2000 subscribers, so let's make that happen. Thank you very much. So part one, the aspects of subtitling. So before you start subtitling, you really need to make sure with the client that you know what they actually ask from you, right? Because the term subtitling or subtitle translation can come in many different forms. Now maybe your client simply wants a transcription, so you simply want to type the spoken part or also the text part on screen into a word file and simply transcription, right? Maybe that's all they need. This is usually the first step that I'm doing, so I would have a video in Swiss German or in German and they ask me to do a German transcription. That's usually the first step. Or maybe the request from the client goes further. Maybe they need a SRT file or a VTT file, so a subtitle file with actual time codes. What you then need to do is, after you transcribe the file, you need to spot the subtitles. Spotting is the act of time coding the different subs, so that they actually fit to the video, right? You do this in a subtitle tool. Maybe the client even needs closed captions, right? They can go further. Closed captions was originally designed for the deaf community. Usually in square brackets you can also read noises on screen, so if I'm here clapping, then it would show clapping on screen as well, right? And then maybe the next step, the last step, is actually translating the subtitles, right? So far we haven't done any translations. So far we've only done subtitling. And now comes the aspect of subtitle translation. But if the client actually wants me to translate the subtitles, I most likely haven't done all the parts before, because it would be in another language, if you know what I mean. So if I'm doing the transcription, if I'm doing the time spotting all in German, then the translation part goes to an English or French translator. So let's get into part two a little bit. The requirements and the skill sets you need to be a subtitler, to offer this as your service. In my translation studies I specialized in multimodal communication. So we did actually subtitling, we did re-speaking as well. I explain this a bit further down in the video. And if you're interested in subtitling, I definitely recommend to get education in audiovisual communication, or maybe a class even, you know. I'm gonna try to find a good class on Coursera or something and link it down in the description. Because just these principles, I'm gonna get into them in this video as well, but it's just better if you have some kind of education and grasps of what's actually needed. There are a lot of very good books. I have one here actually, Audiovisual Translation Subtitling by Jorge Díaz Cintas and Aline Remael. A very good book, it's quite technical, quite complicated. If you really want to get into like very technical parts of subtitling, you know, the first page I open is all about time codes, when to start them exactly, that they fit perfectly with the reading flow. Very insightful. So the main things you have to learn before you can start is one thing, of course, the tools, you know. There are a lot of tools. I'm gonna pop some on the screen here that you can see some logos. Just make sure you do your own research. Usually every translator has their preferred tool. Mine is called Subtitle Edit now, that I work with. I used to work with SRT, it was called. But really try out a few and make sure you find the one that works for you, so you can be efficient and have fun while working on it. But then different clients will have oftentimes their own tools that they work with on a server basis or in a browser. But usually if it's a good client, they will pay you to actually practice their tool, right? And if you know one specific subtitle tool, it's quite easy. The other ones come quite naturally to you anyways. Another big thing to learn before you start subtitling is to condensate and to be concise, right? You oftentimes you don't have enough space to actually do a proper normal translation of a text to cramp into this small little box, right? Because maybe, especially if there are several speakers or if there are a lot of cuts in the video or in the movie, you need to be quick. You need to think very quick. And sometimes you might think to yourself when you watch TV and you see the subtitle and you think, that's not really exact. I don't think that's right. It's a bad translation, you might even think. And it's possible that that's the case. Of course, there's a lot of bad stuff out there, but oftentimes it has to do with the limitations of subtitling, right? Subtitling is a classic example of notion to notion translation rather than word to word. What it means, you just take one notion and you need to transfer the meaning into another notion. And it doesn't really matter what words you use as long as the meaning is there, right? So sometimes you even need to leave stuff out, but you need to make sure that the notion is still transferred. And of course, one other major thing to learn is display principles of subtitles. So let's get into that next. In order to ensure a smooth reading flow of the audience of the subtitles, there are a couple of guidelines you need to keep in mind right now. Now, it's important to mention that these guidelines are generic. If the client has specific guidelines, they are always to be preferred. They're always more important than these generic guidelines that I'm going to mention. But if the client doesn't have any specific guidelines, you can use these ones. So in general, there is a maximum of two lines per frame per subtitle. It can only be two lines, never more, right? Especially in Switzerland or in other countries where there are more than two national languages, it can be quite common to have two languages in one subtitle. So when there is an Italian movie, you would have the top line German and the lower line French. So there you have to talk to the client. But in general, if it's one language per subtitle, you have two lines. Make sure these two lines are in the pyramid form. So the top line should always be shorter than the bottom line, whenever possible, of course. Each line of these two lines per frame can't be longer than 42 characters, right? So in total, you can have 84 characters for both lines. The placement of the subtitle is usually delegated by the tool you use, but ideally, it should be in the center and as low as possible of the screen. Unless there is some kind of credit rolling or some kind of text, then it is possible that you can shift one subtitle up to the top, but then make sure to come back again immediately after. The color and the font should be easily readable. The color has to pop, but it shouldn't be too aggressive. Don't use pink or anything. The best is to just use white either on no background or like a black box with white on top. One subtitle should be on the screen for a minimum of one second and a maximum of seven seconds, never longer. Otherwise, the reader has read the whole thing and it's pointless to keep it there, right? You can just discard it. If the speakers continue to speak and it doesn't make sense for any kind of reason to have subtitles, just let it roll. You can introduce speakers with little dash symbols. So whenever you have two speakers speaking in the same frame and you need to distinguish between them who says what, if someone says hello and the other says hi, and they are too close together so that you can't split them into two subtitles, you can have them in the same, but then you just add a dash before. So dash hello, dash hi. So people know that it's two different speakers. You can also use ellipsis. So the three dots, they are usually intended to make sure to tell the reader that this specific sentence will continue in another subtitle. So for example, if you have a cut in the video and you need to stop the subtitle and then it's 10 seconds of scenery, and then it continues with the same sentence, you would have ellipsis in the first one and in the second one to connect the two. It's really important to not split grammatical units and proper names. So if you have Adrian Propst my name, if you have that in the subtitle, you shouldn't have Adrian in line one and Propst in line two. You should always try to make this into one line. The same goes with grammatical units. So if you have a house, you wouldn't split it between a and house, right? This is a grammatical unit. You would keep this on line one or line two, just for the reading flow. Same goes with commas. After a comma, you can easily split the line, but you wouldn't split a line just a word before the comma. Definitely no bold and underline in the subtitles. That's not a thing. You can use italics sometimes. Usually for foreign words I use that or for just for concepts that are not really clear. And the last thing you really need to consider are camera cuts, right? You can't overrun a subtitle into a next cut. You need to cut the subtitle exactly where the scene cuts. Otherwise it doesn't make sense. If you have a subtitle running into the next scene, it seems very odd for the viewer. So after all this technical information, a little bit more about video types, content types. So things you could typically work with are TV shows and movies, of course. Probably you will work with commercials, internal communication from companies, as well as external actually. Company presentations, blogs, but in video forms or vlogs, documentaries, and even live shows actually. That brings me to re-speaking. I mentioned it earlier a little bit. Re-speaking is a very specific type of subtitling because it's live, right? That's usually done by TV companies. So probably your national broadcasting company, wherever you live, they have a re-speaking department. This is employed, by the way. This is in-house people. It's not usually freelancers. There is someone watching the live show and actually re-speaking what the commentator is saying. And a speech-to-text tool is automatically generating subtitles. And then the re-speaker has a few seconds to make some changes that maybe weren't transferred perfectly. And then it's sent to the live audience. So there the focus is not on precision, not on perfection, but on speed really, right? You need to bring the subtitles out as quickly as possible because if there is a goal in a football game and like a minute later you sent the subtitle, it's irrelevant, right? But all the other content types I mentioned you can do for as a freelancer, for agencies, direct clients, media houses as well. Just make sure you know how long it takes for you because I see so many job postings for subtitlers that it's just ridiculous rates. They pay you $1 per video minute or something. And if you've never worked with subtitles, you don't know what that means, right? It sounds like, okay, maybe $1 per minute, so a 60-minute video, I get $60. That's quite cool, right? But you don't realize that how long it actually takes you. Just to give you an example, for me to transcribe a video and then to spot the time codes to actually have the subtitles without any translation yet, right? Just transcription and time coding, it takes about one hour for five to seven video minutes. So yeah, if you sum this up to this 60-minute video that I mentioned before, let's say six minutes for one hour, so that would be for 60 minutes of video, that would take me 10 hours. And if you're getting $60 for 10 hours of work, then you are doing something wrong, right? We are looking at, I don't know, $400, $500, $600 for 10 hours rather than 60. All right, now enough said, let's see what this actually looks like when I'm working. So I'm going to cut to the workstation now and show you a little demonstration. So as you can see, I'm now here at my workstation, and this is subtitle edit, what you can see at the moment. You have this big black square on the right side where the video will play. On the left side, the subtitles will appear. And on the bottom, the black line is where the waveform will play. That's actually a really good tip if you are figuring out which tool to use. I would really recommend to use one that shows a waveform. I'll show you in a second why this is really useful. So what you do with subtitle edit, you just import the video. Let me just grab a video here from my own videos. I take the imposter one and I just drag it over here into the black screen. Down in the bottom line where the waveform is, I can click on click to add waveform. When I do this, it immediately imports the video and it creates this waveform down here. And now you can clearly see where there is voice, where there is volume. And why this is really useful is you can really start and end the subtitles exactly where the person speaks, right? So now I can play this. There's nothing to be subtitled and now I'm starting to speak. So I know that this part here is where I'm speaking, right? Don't start it exactly on the sound, just a little bit before. And then you click insert, the insert button. And then immediately up here you see on the left side a subtitle has been created. And here you add the text. So if I already have a transcription, what I would do now is copy paste the transcribed version into here. I don't have a transcription for this video yet, so I can just type it. Hello and welcome back to the freelance verse. And now you see that the subtitle turned orange on top. This means that something is not right. Either it's too long in terms of character, it has too many characters, or actually the duration is too short or too long. I can now see here that the single line length is 45. And as you know before, I said 42 is the max, so 45 is too long. So I would just probably do this. Hello and welcome back to the freelance verse. So now I have 18 and 27, the lines, and the duration. I can now play it. So this is exactly where it stops, where the blue line is now. It's exactly where I stopped speaking. And I put a little bit over that, so it's actually perfect. The automated subtitle that I put in is the perfect length. And now I would go on. This would be the number two. Thanks so much for coming back to the channel for this week. It lasts until here, so I pull it there. And I have to split it in the

Speaker 2: middle. And then you can watch it. Hello and welcome back to the freelance verse. Thanks so much for coming back to the channel once again for this week. And that's how it's done. Of course it is now

Speaker 1: English to English. You could also have it translated. And now we have a German subtitle. And yeah, that's all the magic behind it. And then once you're finished, or also during it, you just always save it. The first time you save it, if I just click CTRL-S, it will just save it to my desktop. The preferred format is always SRT. You can see up here actually, SubRip SRT. And then you can deliver this to the client. Hope you enjoyed the video. And let me know in the comments if you are thinking about getting into the subtitling industry. I really enjoy offering the service. I think it's a lot of fun. Hope you enjoyed it. And thanks so much for watching. See you next week. Bye-bye.