Video will make up more than 80% of internet traffic by 2021, according to Cisco, and eight out of the top ten countries with the largest YouTube audiences are non-English speaking. No wonder that video translation is one of this year’s biggest trends. Latest figures show that four times more customers would prefer to watch a video about a product or service than read about it (Animoto), while 85% of videos on Facebook are watched without sound (Digiday).
All sorts of videos can get translated, including company advertising, business or entertainment content, product demos, training, and live-streamed videos where real-life subtitles are translated.
Translating your video content into other languages can bring tremendous benefits to your business, allowing you to reach the most remote parts of the world. Successful translated videos have fully localised content which can apply both to text and audio. In fact, video translation can incorporate all the interactive features of your video content, making it more suitable for the target market as a whole experience and not just the text.
The Process Of Video Translation
Of course it’s only the text that gets translated and localised while the video remains the same. If there are any interactive features that include text, they are translated, too.
The process starts with transcribing all the text in your video. This is an important part of the process for two reasons: it helps produce a flawless translation and is useful because it helps search engines understand what the video is about, making it more likely to have higher rankings. Once transcribed and captioned, the text is transcreated, which means that it is translated and localised according to the target audience. It is also a good idea to optimise your translations at this point. There are various SEO strategies that help get your translated video content achieve better traffic, keyword rankings, and better overall user experience.
Once the translation is ready, it is checked for ‘word swell’ – where the number of words increases in the target language compared to the original word count – and shortened if required.
Types of video translation
Translated subtitles are displayed at the bottom of the screen, time coded so that they match the screen images.
Closed captioning can be translated, too, and includes descriptions of non-spoken elements of the video such as music, sound and elements of action.
Dubbing can also be used for translating speech in a video. The actor’s voice replaces the original voice and starts and finishes at the same time as the original. The lip movements do not match in dubbing.
If you want the lip movements to match, you can opt for lip sync dubbing. This option is used less often as it is more costly.
UN-style voice-over is an option used mostly in programming and interviews, and involves superimposing the target language actor’s voice onto the original, which is turned down but can still be heard over the new voice-over.
By Maia Nikitina
