Found in Translation: How Captioning and Translation Can Deliver Eyeballs

I recently heard a story about the power of captioning and translation that I wanted to share.

By way of background, I was writing a story about cloud encoding, talking to various users to learn why they choose to encode in the cloud, rather than on premise. One of the companies I spoke with was Dotsub, which provides captioning and translation services and uses Heywatch (now coconut.co) as its cloud encoder (Note: Dotsub is no longer in business, but the point of the story remains).

I was discussing the power of captioning with Brooks Lyrette, Dotsub’s CTO, and he related a story that Dotsub’s CEO, David Orban, had recently shared during a presentation. The video he discussed was originally produced in Belgium in German, and documented how members of the European Parliament abuse the system to collect over 14,000 Euros a month (more than Angela Merkel gets paid) while barely working.

And here’s Orban’s description from the talk:

When you bring video technology and video discovery to the surface, you can discover incredible new, previously unknown phenomena. This is a 6-minute journalistic video shot in German that was sitting on Dotsub’s servers doing very little for month after month after month until somebody translated it into Czech. And it exploded in the Czech Republic and it petered off and then a little bit later somebody translated it into French and it re-exploded in France. After 2 years of a few thousand views, this video in 2 months had 3 million views in languages that were 90% not its own language.

Every site is different, and the benefit of captioning will vary significantly for each site. Without question, however, captioning improves video SEO rankings and enhances service to the hearing impaired. Now we learn that it can also dramatically expand the reach of your video if you have a compelling story to tell.

About Jan Ozer

Avatar photo
I help companies train new technical hires in streaming media-related positions; I also help companies optimize their codec selections and encoding stacks and evaluate new encoders and codecs. I am a contributing editor to Streaming Media Magazine, writing about codecs and encoding tools. I have written multiple authoritative books on video encoding, including Video Encoding by the Numbers: Eliminate the Guesswork from your Streaming Video (https://amzn.to/3kV6R1j) and Learn to Produce Video with FFmpeg: In Thirty Minutes or Less (https://amzn.to/3ZJih7e). I have multiple courses relating to streaming media production, all available at https://bit.ly/slc_courses. I currently work as www.netint.com as a Senior Director in Marketing.

Check Also

Take the Bitmovin Video Developer Survey

Contribute to the one of the most valuable sources of industry data by completing the …

Speech-to-text In Premiere Pro – Fast, Easy, Accurate, and Free

This video tutorial teaches you how to convert speech-to-text in Premiere Pro. I’ve been using …

Streaming Media 101: Training for App & Player Development/Testing Professionals

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *