Audiovisual translation

Audiovisual translation service

Audiovisual communication has naturally gained ground over print media. Both formats complement each other perfectly in videos with subtitles. These audiovisual materials offer a very effective way to reach target audiences as they combine the strengths of written text with images and sound. Professional subtitling translation helps a company to more efficiently and effectively target international audiences and provides businesses with an important competitive advantage in terms of corporate communications.

The risks of using a free subtitle translation service

When browsing the internet, it is very common to find videos with automatic subtitles: there are free online applications that combine voice recognition with machine translation to generate subtitles. Typically, the resulting video warns the audience that "subtitles have been automatically generated".

What is the purpose of this warning? It is because the poor legibility of the resulting text. Please bear in mind that for such translation to be effective, the voice recognition system needs to have worked perfectly. Otherwise, the final translation will be very different from the original subtitles, resulting in inconsistent messages and making it difficult to understand the content.

The success of these tools lies very much in the fact that they are free - and not so much in the results they produce. If you need or want to translate a video's subtitles, and don't see the need to invest in the services of a translator or an agency, then the subtitles generated will not be as readable as they should be. And if the company or the client fails to emphasise this fact, its brand image will suffer in the eyes of the target audience.

Why get a professional translator to translate your subtitles?

1. Because it is important to reuse all the audiovisual material created.
2. Because maintaining a good brand image is fundamentally important in marketing and advertising.
3. Because international audiences will not understand what you want to convey if you don't make an effort with the translation (that is, if you don't produce a good, high-quality translation).

It is common knowledge that there is a huge difference between machine-generated translations and those produced by an international translator or a professional translation agency. Why should this be any different with video subtitles? Why not put some effort into translating them to the required standards of quality?

At sanscrit agency, we have a multidisciplinary translator profile that can deliver translations quickly and with a much more reliable final result than that obtained with machine translation tools. We understand the need to translate corporate video subtitles into the language of the target audience. And we therefore encourage our clients to allow us to translate their subtitles.