Several studies conducted over the past few years have shown that videos are the most powerful way to market a service or a product. In fact, statistics suggest that videos – such as those you might see on YouTube or Vimeo, for example – are as much as 600% more effective than more traditional marketing tools, like direct mail or print ads, for example. Videos also provide an excellent way to train new employees and/or teach students. Rather than investing the substantial amount of money it would take to send trainers or teachers to various locations to conduct training sessions in person, for example, simply making a training video available to new employees is a simple, cost effective solution. So it makes sense to use this incredibly powerful medium for your own marketing or training efforts. And if you want to further maximize the effectiveness of your videos, consider adding multilingual captions.
Most of us are familiar with subtitles, which consist of written text that appears at the bottom of the screen while a video plays. Basically, a subtitle provides a way for a viewer to read the text of the video without listening to the audio track. Subtitles are typically translations of the text into another language, which allows your video to be viewed by a much larger audience than it would be otherwise.
Adding subtitles to your video can increase the effectiveness no matter what purpose your video is intended for. Just consider the advantages of using subtitles for a variety of different types of videos:
Language Studies
Perhaps nowhere is it more obvious how subtitles can benefit the video viewer than in the field of language studies. Whether you are listening to an audio track in your native language and reading subtitles in the language you are trying to learn, or vice-versa, research has shown that hearing one language while reading the same text in a different one is one of the most effective ways to learn a new language.
Training Employees
As we mentioned earlier, videos provide an excellent way to train new employees. If your staff is comprised of non-native-English speakers, subtitles will allow those employees to watch the same video as their English-speaking coworkers.
Marketing
Whether you’re a CPA looking for new clients, or trying to sell small appliances to the general public, videos have been shown to be the most effective means of marketing your service or product. Thanks to subtitles, you can create a single video that can be used in virtually any country throughout the world – and all that’s required is simply changing the subtitles to the language of your target audience.
Live Events
The extraordinary popularity of TED talks is just one example of how powerful videos of live events can be. If you’re attempting to make your live event video accessible to the largest audience possible, subtitles are the solution.
Now that we’ve established how effective videos are and how subtitles can optimize this powerful medium, let’s talk about how those subtitles are created. Obtaining the highest quality of subtitles requires a combination of both technology and human skills. The first step is to connect with a reputable translation agency that can put you in touch with a trained, experienced linguist – one who is not only fluent in the target language, but also one with experience in creating subtitles. By viewing the original video (and working with a script of that video, if possible), the translator will create subtitles that are not only true to the original audio track, but also text that is localized so that it is appropriate for the viewer. Once that translation is complete, it can be provided to a video company to be incorporated into the video itself. Your video can be a powerful tool, and subtitles can make it even more effective. So don’t trust the job of creating subtitles to any type of machine translation software. Instead, rely on the expertise of a trained language professional. Your video is worth it!