How to choose a professional closed-captioning service ?

We can never stress this enough, but doing captions is hard work.

Whether for small or large video projects, transcribing speech into text reliably and properly requires very specific skills. And even as speech recognition technologies are improving, human expertise is still needed to optimize the result.

So who should you entrust your video content to for professional subtitling? And why a closed-captioning service still so important?

Always on the lookout for the latest trends around closed captions, we tell you everything. Hang tight!

Why use professional closed-captioning services?

You already know how captions increase the accessibility of your videos and improve the reading experience. Adding subtitles provides understandable and reliable visual support for your audience, whether they have hearing loss or not. They can also allow you to share your content around the world, regardless of nationality and language.

But not just any type of caption can do the trick. The format of the subtitle should fit common-sense rules. See, for example, in the case of specific fields such as media and broadcasting, or the United States, which have strict regulations (Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010). That is:

• An accurate transcription that takes into account the subtleties of audio and video.
• Creating subtitle files with precise formatting.
• Making subtitles in a readable and comprehensible form for all
• A professional translation that takes into account semantic and cultural differences
• A repeatable and truly productive process

That's why it's important to call on a professional service:

• You save time and energy by delegating this task to a professional service.
• You ensure a result that meets high requirements in terms of accessibility and customer experience.
• You save money by using a service that has efficient and scalable processes

If you have a huge amount of video content or lack the skills, then professional subtitling is a must for you!

Choosing a subtitling service: factors to consider

Now that you know if you should go into professional captioning, how do you choose a good service provider? There are many factors to consider depending on your project. Here are the ones you should keep in mind when making your selection:

• Your video workload: if you have a big project, it's best to turn to an agency. If you have smaller ones, freelancers or subtitling solutions.
• The audience you want to target: if you are targeting a French audience it is better to have an expert in the French language.
• The number of languages available: not all services translate the same languages.
• The service pricing: to be taken into account, the price/hour of subtitling, the cost of credits and possible types of subscriptions.
• The technology provided: some use automatic speech to text technology. The more advanced this technology is, the faster and more satisfactory the result will be.
• The design of the platform: if you have to use the platform yourself, you need a user-friendly design.
• The customer service quality. Customer support is not the same from one company to another.
• The range of features (transcription, subtitle customization, file formats, subtitle fonts, etc.).

With all these factors in mind, you can then easily compare the subtitling solutions available on the Internet.

Which kind of captions services are available on the net?

There are two types of captioning services that you can find on the net.

Automatic subtitling solutions

The first ones base their value on an automatic subtitle generator. With their speech recognition technology, they transcribe your video content in a short time and can translate it with built-in translation engines. They may provide also a subtitle editing platform, so you can optimize the result by yourself.

The added value of these services is that you can manage the project by yourself or in your company, saving you time. This works well for small projects. But at the moment, for more complex or high-volume projects it still requires a lot of time and effort. At this level, the assistance of subtitling professionals is still relatively essential.

The more these AI technologies develop, the more projects will be done independently. This is the future of subtitling!

We can mention here: the built-in solution of YouTube, Facebook, solutions such as Happyscribe.com, Kapwing.com and of course our solution Checksub.com.

We recommend that you take a look at it if you want to manage your video projects on the internet and these projects are not very big (marketing videos, corporate communication videos, presentation videos, courses….).

Professional captioning services

This second type consists of connecting you directly with subtitling and translation professionals (agencies and freelancers). They will take charge of your project according to the deadlines and conditions you choose. The benefits are that you get attractive prices and the expertise of actors who have already proven their skills.

This is of course especially suitable for organizations with large video projects (media, cinema, universities, large companies and agencies) since they can stay in touch with them throughout the process. So they can trust these services completely. Examples include Authôt.com, Rev.com, Scribie.com, etc.

The drawbacks, on the other hand, are that you don't necessarily have full visibility on the result, and you can't necessarily edit it the way you want. In addition, the language and customization possibilities are usually quite limited.

Here, we show you why our solution can help you better.

Generating subtitles in collaboration with professionals: Checksub

The uniqueness of our approach at Checksub is to combine these two services to bring great value to video professionals. With our new subtitling platform, we combine the power of our automatic subtitle generator with the collaboration of subtitling specialists (agencies and freelancers). This means that a professional can take care of your video, but also that the employees themselves can check and optimize the result if needed on the platform.

In short, Checksub is a platform for collaboration between professionals and clients, where everyone finds value thanks to a user-friendly and powerful interface. Here are the specific features of our solution :

• An advanced speech recognition API
• A collaborative interface with subtitlers and translators to handle your video project
• A machine translation engine to translate your video, with 128 different languages available.
• A powerful and easy-to-use online subtitle editor

We'll let you test it out. And if you need more information, you can contact us directly.

We hope this will help you find the service that will take your closed captioning projects to new heights!