Skip to content
THE DEMOCRACY LABS orange and white logo.THE DEMOCRACY LABS orange and black logo.
  • Home
  • Case Studies
  • Resources
  • Partners
  • Press
  • About
  • Donate
    Donate
THE DEMOCRACY LABS orange and black logo.
  • Home
  • Case Studies
  • Resources
  • Partners
  • Press
  • About
  • Donate
    Donate

Reach more people. Caption and translate videos.

DemLabs blog

February 11, 2021

Caption and translate your videos to other languages to extend their reach and audience.

Reach the one in five Americans who do not speak English and others who prefer to watch videos on mute. Add captions and translations to your videos.

This blog explains how we captioned a video with the clips of the riot and impeachment hearing, and then translated the video into Spanish, Chinese and Hindi. We'll also cover:
- Different ways to generate captions
- Why it is important to combine both machine translation and human proof-reading
- What is a video with a burnt in caption vs. a selectable close caption (CC)
- A map by county that shows the percentage of people who speak a language other than English at home

Captioned & translated video clip from impeachment hearing

This video is a montage of the English, Spanish, Chinese and Hindi videos of the same clip. You can watch any of them with audio directly on YouTube.

Caption and translate your videos to reach more people.

Captioning and translation tips

Videos can be automatically captioned with apps but should be proofread before creating captions.
Create your own captions offers more flexibility on how you can distribute videos rather than being tied to captioning service which is tied to a platform like YouTube or Facebook.
Videos can be automatically translated into over thirty languages, once captions have been generated.
Captions can either be 'burnt' on a video, or uploaded as a separate caption file (VTT) which can be uploaded to different video streaming platforms.

The original video is first captioned by software and manually proofread. It is then translated and captioned into different languages.

Proofread machine-generated captions

Captioning software listens to what is being said and transcribes that into words which are placed a the bottom of the video as captions. They are about 70-90% accurate depending on the app and how clear the soundtrack it. Proofread the captions manually to fix any errors before adding them to your video. Here are some errors we caught while translating this video.

Proofread machine generated captions before adding them to the videos.

Spanish and Chinese translations of the captions

Burnt captions vs Caption files

Videos consist of three elements - video, soundtrack and captions. Captions can be added to a video in two ways:
1. Embedding or 'burning' them into the video. Viewers can click on such captioned videos and watch them immediately.
2. Captions can also be added as a separate VTT file. "A VTT file is a text file saved in the Web Video Text Tracks (WebVTT) format. It contains supplementary information about a web video, including subtitles, captions, descriptions, chapters, and metadata. VTT files do not contain any video data." This lets viewers choose the language of the captions that they'd like to see.
The English, Spanish and Chinese videos in this example have 'burnt-in' captions. The Hindi version of the video uses a VTT file for the captions.

Web Video Text Tracks (WebVTT) files contain supplementary information about a web video, including subtitles, captions, descriptions, chapters, and metadata.

Video with captions on YouTube

English

spanish

Chinese

Hindi

Languages spoken by county

This map shows the percentage of people by county who speak languages other than English at home. It can be freely shared with this link or embedded in a web site with this code: < iframe width="300" height="200" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" allowfullscreen src="https://arcg.is/1S8jyC">

Reach the one in five Americans who do not speak English and others who prefer to watch videos on mute. Add captions and translations to your videos.

Takeaway: You spend a lot of time, money and energy on creating videos. Make sure to maximize their impact by adding captions and translations. Learn more here.

Deepak
DemLabs

Captions,translations

Share this Newsletter:

Share on twitter
Share on linkedin
Share on facebook

Subscribe to DemLabs Bulletin

Donate to DemLabs

DemLabs applies innovative technology and storytelling tools in service of democratic values. It lowers the barrier of funding for worthy candidates and non-profits by applying existing free/affordable solutions.

Copyright © 2023 The Democracy Labs | A Project of the Advocacy Fund | Privacy Policy
Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram
Scroll to Top
[class^="wpforms-"]
[class^="wpforms-"]