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Content creators on the Internet do massive work every day not only creating impressive video content, but also making sure it reaches out to their target audience. Living in a global community, their content can not only transcend geographic boundaries but also language capabilities.
Let’s talk about the second biggest search engine in the world and one of the top social media platforms, YouTube. If you notice, more and more videos on YouTube nowadays come with subtitles. This is how content creators reach out to more viewers globally, YouTube subtitling.
What are Subtitles?
Subtitles are the text version of speech or voice content in videos, translated into different languages for foreign viewers. It doesn’t incorporate non-speech sounds made in the videos. Therefore. subtitles are not as suitable for the hearing impaired for an immersive video watching experience as having captions. However, they can still understand the content of the video and may enjoy it just as much.
YouTube is not only the biggest video content platform, it also hosts a variety of video content types. You can find skits, comedies, music videos, home videos, short movies, series and many more.
With so much video content in YouTube from all around the world, people can consume whatever they like with the use of subtitles. Viewers don’t have to wonder what was being said and figure out actors’ body language anymore. Whether it is a mukbang in Japanese, makeup tutorial in Arabic, or pranks in French, we can understand and enjoy them all.
Why Must There Be YouTube Subtitling In Your Videos?
First of all, is there a need to add subtitles to the videos you upload on the Internet? The answer is YES! When you add subtitles to YouTube videos, your video will rank higher in search results.Â
As mentioned before, people from different corners of the world can consume the content you put out, regardless of individual language and/or physical capabilities.Â
And last but not least, high audience engagement is very important in social media. Viewers are aware of you and what you have to offer, your messages get sent across better and you get better reach to your audience. In other words, having more views, likes, comments, shares, mentions and subscribers help to grow your ROI.
How Did YouTube Subtitling Come About?
Subtitles were traditionally used for the hearing-impaired viewers. Today, captions are better suited for them as it includes non-speech sounds, giving non-verbal cues for better watching experience.
In the past decade or so, consumption of foreign video content has increased and now it has become available for foreign viewers who don’t understand the language used in the videos.Â
Sometimes, due to different accents in the videos, it gets really hard to understand what the speaker says, and subtitles are hands down the best solution to this problem as well.Â
How To Get Started With YouTube Subtitling?
YouTube subtitling has the option of transforming the submitted data into metadata, which will help make your videos appear in search results. The end result of this is that you will get more viewers on YouTube. This has a great potential to increase the number of your viewers, helping your video rank better in search results.
If you submit the actual texts of the subtitles of your videos, YouTube will immediately send the caption file to Google Translate, and this happens automatically. Your foreign audience can then easily select the Translate Captions option and enjoy your video in their preferred language.
YouTube Studio has also simplified the process of YouTube Subtitling where content creators can add captions to their video content automatically via Google’s voice detection software.
Drawbacks of Automated YouTube Subtitling
As a content creator, your ultimate goal is to ensure that your viewers keep watching your videos until the end. Incomplete video views will decrease or hamper your earnings from Youtube, thus, reducing your ROI.
However, due to the limitations of technology, automatic subtitling sometimes fail to correspond with the voice content of the videos. And viewers end up with badly written and/or translated subtitles. This may reduce the comprehension of the content itself and reducing viewer’s satisfaction.
Although it holds a supporting role in your video production, bad subtitling may annoy viewers, thus, causing incomplete video views, negative comments, dislikes and potential viewers to stay away from watching your content.
Why Engage Professional YouTube Subtitling Services?
To avoid bad subtitling and its consequences, there are many professional YouTube subtitling services available that can help you. These professional subtitling services are done by real human beings, painstakingly listening and transcribing and/or translating every word manually, thus, providing the correct grammatical, punctuational and syntactical sentences for your video content.
You may decide to go DIY and add the subtitles to your videos yourself. However, it is a very tedious job and takes a lot of your time. You could otherwise use the time for producing more interesting video content that viewers want to see.Â
And with the recent announcement made by YouTube to discontinue its automated captioning functions due to underutilisation, there is a greater need for professional subtitling and captioning services.
What Languages Should You Have Your Youtube Subtitles In?
You don’t need to have subtitles in every language just yet. That would be a huge undertaking and definitely costly, especially for new and mid-level YouTubers. However, you can check out your audience demographics in YouTube Analytics. You can see your audience’s geographies and get subtitles for your biggest fans in respective languages.
To conclude
Youtube subtitling benefits video content creators by:
– Reaching global audiences
– Getting more engagements to videos
– Ranking better in search results
– Increase earnings and ROI
There are many other video content platforms apart from YouTube such as Vimeo. Streaming giants such as Netflix and Disney+, and new social media apps such as TikTok and Snapchat, are also sprouting into the market more and more. Subtitling services may be more in demand now than ever.
