What is multi-language subtitle services?

by Target Language Translation Services

- September 01 2021

Multi-language subtitle services allow a non native audience to understand what is being said in a video by reading text in their own language when they have difficulties understanding the original audio within the video.

By limiting your language options you are limiting your audience. Many successful video channels now provide numerous foreign language subtitles options for their viewers to choose from to widen their audience reach.

The Scope of Multi-Language Subtitles

While it may seem like the need for adding subtitles for two or more languages is rare, brands have come to use these now, more than ever. Multi-language subtitles are of great use when your audience or participants (of an event) comprise people from various geographical and linguistic backgrounds. Such a diverse set of people typically appear in the following situations: global meets, online events (such as webinars, live talks, etc.), in-store visual content (like advertisements, announcements, etc.) and many moe...

Best Practices for Utilizing Multi-Language Subtitles

Adding multi-language subtitles to your videos needs to pay attention to the following things:

Add subtitles for just two languages

Adding two different subtitles to your video takes up a substantial amount of space, per frame. This leads to readability issues for the viewers as they desperately try to find the subtitle for their language and read it before the frame changes. So, you must make sure that you add only two languages to your videos.

To reach audience speaking various languages, do a little research before the event or before creating your marketing videos. Or run a poll to determine the two languages spoken by the majority and create subtitles accordingly.

Make the time-coded source text short

This is a general rule suitable to all kinds of subtitles – the shorter the subtitles in each frame, the easier it is to read them. However, this rule is especially vital for multi-language subtitles. Make sure that the subtitle for each language doesn’t run into more than one line per frame.

The best way to avoid any readability issue is to keep the length of the subtitles to a minimum, which will make it easier for the subtitling expert to translate without reducing a lot of text.

Select a proper colour for each language

Finding the right subtitle and reading it in a limited time in itself is not a easy task for the viewer. So, you must try to make it as effortless as possible.

One way is, to select a font colour or background colour for each language, which will save the viewer the hassle of finding out the right subtitles every time the frame changes. This practice is essential when displaying subtitles for languages that look/read similar, for instance, Arabic and Urdu.

Burn the subtitles to the video

For multi-language subtitles, correct formatting is of great importance. Without it, you run the risk of ruining the viewers’ visual experience. When you don’t burn subtitles to your online live event or webinar, you leave it to the viewers to adjust the formatting (based on their player and browser settings). It might lead to issues like an increased font size that does not fit in the frame or a right-to-left language displayed incorrectly.

Differences between multi-language subtitles & multilingual subtitles

These terms are often confused and utilized in the wrong context. Multi-language subtitles refer to the practice of displaying subtitles in more than one language simultaneously. While multilingual subtitles refer to subtitles in more than one language (not displayed simultaneously) and subtitles of visual content, which originally includes the utilization of multiple languages.

So, if you decided to display subtitles for two languages – English and French – in your video, that would be called multi-language subtitling. If you decided to get an expert for adding subtitles in English and your video has speakers or characters talking in Italian, Russian, and Dutch, that would be called multilingual subtitling.

If you’re looking to utilize multilingual subtitling to expand your video audience by providing your viewers with different language options, take a look at our multilingual translation services to see how we can help.

At Target Language Translation Services, our professional subtitlers are highly experienced and qualified in working with a wide range of subtitle formats. We provide affordable, high quality multi-language subtitling and translation services.

At Target Language Translation Services, our mission is to improve accessibility by encouraging the wider spread adoption of subtitling services across the globe. Whilst many translation companies offer different rates depending on language and the availability of linguists, we aim to keep our video translation prices as uniform as possible and charge appropriately for the subtitling aspect, significantly reducing translation costs for our clients

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