We did some subtitling work recently for PhillyCAM, a public-access network in Philadelphia, PA.

This excellent community organization is producing a series of videos to inform the city’s many immigrant communities about this year’s U.S. census. We took their 3-minute multilingual video, and added subtitles in seven languages, plus English.

This got me thinking about the right way and the wrong way to create subtitles.

Many corporate and educational videos are subtitled or captioned – it’s the least expensive way to create multilingual content. But it’s often done carelessly: a transcript is sent to a translation agency, which simply translates it word for word, as it would any text, and then the new language is copy-and-pasted into the video as subtitles, roughly timed to the original dialogue.

There’s one big problem with that: reading takes more time than hearing. Viewers can’t absorb as much from subtitles as they can by simply listening to the original language. In addition, many languages – for example French, Spanish and German – take up to 25% more words than English to say the same thing. So if your subtitles are just a translated transcript, the screen ends up full of words that a) obscure the picture, and b) don’t actually get absorbed by the viewer.

The right way to create subtitles, whether for a feature film or for a training video, is to adapt and condense. Working in professional subtitling software (such as EZTitles, SubtitleNEXT or Annotation Edit), the subtitler finds a way to capture the essence of the dialogue while following widely accepted international subtitling standards:

    • A maximum of 43 characters per line and two lines per subtitle (that maximum is 42 characters for Netflix, and fewer for theatrical feature films
    • A reading speed (measured in characters per second) that gives the reader enough time to read the text while also taking in the picture.
    • Logical segmentation – breaking up the text into lines in a way that allows the viewer to absorb the subtitles quickly and accurately.

The result is a more accessible, easily understood video. Your audience will thank you.

To talk to us about subtitling your video, drop us a line.