Whether you are a content creator, event manager, meeting organiser, or busy professional, adding subtitles or closed captions to your live content and videos is a game-changer.
A recent study by UK charity Stagetext reports that four out of five young people use subtitles when they watch TV. The charity's research further suggested an average of 31% of people would go to more live events if more had captions on a screen in the venue.
Subtitling and captioning have begun to shape a new norm of how people consume videos and live content. But as soon as words start appearing on video screens, many people tend to use the terms captions and subtitles interchangeably.
Let's look at subtitles and captions in-depth: What are they, and how do they differ?
In this article, we’re going to look at the differences between subtitles, and captioning, and what their best use case is.
1. Captioning
1.3. Where captions can be used
1.4. How people access captions
1.6. How captions are generated
2. Subtitles
2.3. The benefits of subtitles
2.4. Where subtitles can be used
2.5 How subtitles are generated
3. The differences between captions and subtitles
Captioning is the process of transcribing audio content (of a television broadcast, film, video, live event, or other production) into text as transcription and displaying that text on a screen, monitor, or other visual display.
Essentially, captions benefit everyone. As mentioned earlier, a vast majority of younger people use captions for one reason or another. Captions provide a visual aid to follow the audio content with visual reinforcement. Especially useful for people with hearing impairment, captions are also popular to watch content while being in a noisy environment.
More than 100 empirical studies document that captioning a video improves comprehension of, attention to, and memory of the video.
In a nutshell, captions can help:
Discover 5 surprising captioning facts →
Captions are increasingly popular for live events, such as webinars, presentations, or conferences, providing a visual aid to follow the speech.
Some might have difficulty hearing — so adding captions makes it easy for them to read what’s being said. Others might prefer reading over listening because they might be in a noisy environment such as a café or on public transport.
Captions make it easier to catch and keep your audience’s attention. It’s much easier to follow what’s going on (and validate what’s being said) if there are captions.
The captions are synchronized with the audio so that they appear as the audio is delivered. There are different methods to create captions: off-line, if they are created and added after a video segment has been recorded and before it is aired or played, or online, when they are created in real-time, at the time of content origination.
Captions can also cater to multilingual audiences by making the speech available as live transcriptions in other languages than the speakers':
If you are a foreign movie aficionado, odds are you're a regular user of subtitles.
Subtitles translate a video dialogue into other languages so that audiences all over the world can watch videos and movies even when they don't understand the language spoken. Subtitles are text derived from a transcript of the dialogue in films, TV programs, or video games.
Subtitles are usually displayed either at the bottom of the screen or at the top of the screen if there is already text at the bottom of the screen.
Like captions, subtitles in videos are great for a number of reasons:
Because subtitles are designed for people who can hear the audio but don't understand it, they are mainly used in movies and TV series amongst those who like watching content in its original version but cannot understand it. Also, often they are produced and synchronized before the video is released and most on-demand video streaming platforms include them.
Often, subtitles are translated by professional translators before they are added to videos, movies and the like. Advancements in technology have also made it possible now to generate subtitles automatically in real time.
For live events, webinars, business meetings, or conferences, subtitles can be produced automatically by utilizing a combination of Automated Speech Recognition and Machine Translation technology.
Contrary to popular belief, the two are not synonymous. While captions are designed to support the hard of hearing, subtitles are translations for people who don’t speak the language of the content. They are often used for movies and TV shows and are typically developed before the release of a film or show.
We've established that the key difference between captions and subtitles lies in their distinct purpose. But with advances in technology, that add live translation solutions to captioning capabilities, the lines between captions and subtitles become increasingly blurred.
Simultaneous interpretation —on-site or remote—, translation, captioning and subtitles all fulfill the purpose of reducing communication barriers. Deciding which one to use depends mainly on your type of content and user needs.
When it comes to deciding on the technology, besides user needs, setting and budget also play a key role. There are services that event managers can use to get access to interpreters and human-interpreted live captions in virtual and hybrid setups. Platforms such as Interprefy enable real-time simultaneous interpretation and live captioning on any event type and meeting empowering event managers to deliver content in a variety of languages.