The best sound is silence: why your video needs Captioning and Subtitling

The best sound is silence: why your video needs Captioning and Subtitling

So you have a visually stunning video with a targeted message, a clear brand identity, and is sure to deliver you big on your ROI. And yet you’re left wondering, how will it best reach the world?

According to recent reports, most videos on social media are viewed without sound. In fact, 85% of videos viewed on Facebook are silent.

Have you ever been sitting in your office, scrolling through your Facebook feed when all of a sudden Heavy Metal Cats starts playing full blast? Sorry to knock you off your chair Betty. I’ll keep it down next time.

What does this have to do with captioning and subtitling?

A lot.

When most of us watch videos silently, you’re guaranteed to miss out on viewership if you don’t plan for them to be read.  

Now let’s say your native language is Spanish. Can you imagine passing over a video you didn’t understand? Most likely.

Captioning and language subtitling is a guaranteed way to keep your target audience engaged. And it doesn’t stop at social media.

Whether it’s a corporate training video translated from English to Japanese for your sister company overseas, commercial spot, or TED talk; your videos will reach more people if captioned and subtitled.

At CBH, we have researched and developed the most effective and streamlined processes for creating captions and language translations for our clients’ videos. What we’ve found is a better way that not only saves money but allows us to have more control over the process.

For example in the past, if a video needed to be translated into 12 languages, that video would need to be translated by the client using their own translators, sent to a third-party vendor with 12 translated scripts, and then that vendor would employ 12 additional translators to get the subtitles made and delivered.

Turnaround was slow. The company’s brand identity was sometimes “lost in translation.” And, the process was expensive.

Now we use 3Play Media to create our English captions and Amara Integration to create language subtitles from the English captions. Translators are either employed by the client or we can draw from a network of over 2,500 professional linguists.

The result?

We are able to deliver SRT files for a multitude of platforms in whatever language you need. Turnaround can take as little as 3 days (for English captions). We can also burn-in languages over your videos, or integrate languages into animated text and graphics.

Using this process, we have been able to cut our clients’ costs by nearly 75 percent.

Here’s a sample of the work we've done.

Happy watching! (Shh. Keep it down out there.)