As a YouTube creator and artist, your YouTube channel must probably count several videos available online. But do you know how important it is to add good quality transcribed subtitles to your videos? Let’s explore this fascinating topic!

Why Should You Include Transcribed Subtitles to Your Videos?

When you publish a video on YouTube, you want that a maximum of viewers can see it, and in that respect, adding transcribed subtitles is very useful.

Indeed, transcribed subtitles:

• Allow deaf and hard of hearing viewers to access your content.
• Help your video Google SEO.
• Allow to translate your content into other languages.

Plus, implementing such subtitles can help you grow your community faster and interact with viewers you haven’t access before.

Now that you are convinced that doing so is a must for your videos…

How to Get Transcribed Subtitles for Your Videos?

YouTube Auto-generated Transcribed Subtitles

First, you can use YouTube auto-generated transcribed subtitles. These are generated thanks to speech recognition technology and appear on the screen word per word.

This solution is very easy to implement and once you have activated this YouTube feature, the auto-generated subtitles will be displayed on your video when a viewer selects them.

But this type of subtitles doesn’t comply with subtitling standards, such as the ones you are used to when you watch a Netflix series with subtitles.

Besides, although they are rather well synched, they also include a lot of errors:

• Spelling mistakes: this type of error happens for instance when the speaker pronounces a proper noun or mispronounces a word.
• Repetitions: more often than not, a subtitle should not be displayed when the speaker repeats several times the same word.
• Gibberish: this happens when the speaker uses two languages to express himself/herself in the video. For instance, when the speaker uses English as first language and Korean as second language, the Korean YouTube auto-generated transcribed subtitles are total gibberish.

Ask a Professional

You can also – and that’s what I really advise you to do – ask a professional to perform this task. To do so, you will need to send him/her the video you want transcribed subtitles for, and if you have one, the script of the video, or if not, the YouTube auto-generated subtitle file.

The professional transcriber will use a dedicated subtitling tool to perform the task. Such a software is much more advanced than what the YouTube platform offers and allows the transcriber and subtitler to deliver a subtitles file that comply with the subtitling standards. This means that:

• Each subtitle includes max. two lines.
• Each line includes max. 42 characters.
• Each subtitle lasts 1 to 7 seconds.
• The maximum reading speed of a subtitle should be lower or equal to 21 characters/second.
• Sound information are mentioned between parentheses.
• On-screen texts are mentioned between brackets.
• Linguistic/Syntactic entities are kept unbroken, such as:
  • Article + Noun
  • Adjective + Noun
  • Preposition + the entity it refers to

Ultimately, when you include professionally processed transcribed subtitles in your YouTube video, it allows your viewers to read the subtitles more easily. They get the full message which includes the on-screen text, the subtitles and the other visual information displayed on the screen.

Final Step

Once your professional transcriber and subtitler have sent you the good quality transcribed subtitle file, you can implement it on your YouTube video via the YouTube platform.

Last but not least, you can use this file, commonly known as “Master file”, to translate your content in other languages and further expand your reach and grow your audience.

In Brief

Implementing professionally transcribed subtitles in your YouTube video:

1. Allow deaf and hard of hearing viewers having access to your content.
2. Help your video Google SEO.
3. Allow to translate your video into other languages to expand your video reach and grow your audience.
4. Allow you to get good quality subtitles.
5. Allow your video to comply with subtitling industry standard such as the number of characters per line and the maximum reading speed.

If you have any question about implementing transcribed subtitles to your video, do not hesitate to contact me.