Adding YouTube Subtitles – Your Options

Subtitling YouTube videos can be a great way to boost your SEO, translate your videos and appeal to a wider audience. All too often, video content creators spend hours, days, even weeks filming and editing their videos, only to skip out on the final step of subtitling their efforts. Leaving videos without captions can have a huge impact on your potential viewing figures. Similarly, allowing automatic captioning and voice recognition to do the work for you can have a devastating, sometimes embarrassing results for deaf and hard of hearing viewers. We know that video production can be expensive, and subtitling services can seem like just another expense. For this reason, this blog looks at options for cheap subtitles for online videos, and adding YouTube subtitles on a budget.

Professional SRT YouTube Subtitles 

Using a subtitling and translation company for your YouTube subtitles usually brings about the best results. The easiest way to add subtitles to YouTube is to create an SRT file and upload it to display alongside your video where it can be turned on or off by viewers as required.

Sending your YouTube videos to a subtitling company means you can rest while all the hard work is done for you. Capital Captions prices are usually calculated on a per video minute basis, and turnarounds can be as fast as within four hours.

Captioning companies will have experience working with subtitling on a daily basis and approach subtitling in stages. Transcription will be undertaken by highly skilled, experienced transcriptionists with good listening skills, knowledge of the English language and perfect use of punctuation and grammar. Subtitlers work to split lines of text in a logical way, taking into account pauses in speech, punctuation and formatting. A professional translator will both translate and localise text, taking into account turns of phrase, contextual knowledge of the source and target language.

Subtitle Burning for YouTube Videos 

If you would like your subtitles to display permanently on your video without viewers having to turn them on and off, subtitle burning is what you need. Burning subtitles is also a great option for subtitles on videos with a lot of onscreen text and graphics, as the text can be placed around that text or formatted so it’s easier to read. Subtitles can be burned onto any video in any format including MOV, AVI, MP4, WMV and countless other formats. Captioning companies are also able work with the video, matching bit rate, frame rate and resolution.

Automated YouTube Subtitles 

YouTube’s automated subtitles are an option for videos with clear sound or little/no background music, few speakers and little/no over-speaking. When a video is uploaded to YouTube, the site will create automatic captions using a mix of voice recognition and automated timings.

There are a few issues with the automated subtitles that YouTube provides. The first and most well known issue is mistakes within the transcription aspect of subtitling. Often, automated transcription errors completely change the meaning of what was said, sometimes with confusing, even hilarious results.

The second issue with automated subtitling is the lack of punctuation. Even with a transcription that is spot-on, text with little to no full stops, commas or other punctuation can be highly confusing to read.

If you intend to use automated subtitling for your YouTube videos, it’s absolutely crucial that you also take the time to view and amend the caption file. This may include correcting any transcription errors and formatting and working on optimal line splits and timings for a better result.

Transcription for YouTube Subtitles 

If you have a script available or transcript of your videos, there is an option to upload it onto the YouTube site via settings. Using your own transcription ensures that even if there are mistakes in the timings of your video, the quality of the subtitles may be improved.

Machine Translation for YouTube Videos 

If you have a subtitle file for YouTube, you may want your video to appeal to foreign audiences. Using a professional subtitle translation company for your foreign videos is always the best option.

Whilst it’s possible to easily achieve a machine translation from an SRT file, the quality of writing is likely to be highly compromised. Whilst the standard of machine translation is slowly improving, these translations are literal and therefore, riddled with comprehension issues and mistakes.

For translation, using a professional linguist is a must. You may consider saving money by having a translator proofread your machine translation. However, these types of translation will often require an entire rewrite, and therefore the charge will almost equal that of translating from scratch.

So there you have it, a quick look at your options when it comes to adding YouTube subtitles. If you are interested in finding out more about adding subtitles to your YouTube videos contact us today for a free, no obligation quote.