Subtitles play a vital role when you watch a film in a foreign language. Subtitling might seem quite simple. After all, what can be complicated with translating some dialogue and then creating subtitles for them? Well, you can understand the importance of quality subtitles if you have ever watched content from some illegal source. Such content often comes with poor-quality subtitles that ruin the experience of the video. Trusted video subtitling service providers have to deal with many challenges in order to provide quality subtitles. Further in this blog, we have mentioned those challenges in detail.
Text length and screen width
This is the most common challenge that professional video subtitling services experts have to face. The written text varies in length across languages and English texts fell shorter most of the time. This means, text expansion commonly occurs when translating something from one language to other. But the translators have to fit the translated text into a fixed space without ruining the meaning and emotions of the dialogue.
Text length and dialogue speed
Another issue that the translators face during subtitling is caused by the dialogue speed of a video. When dialogue delivery in the footage is faster than the reading speed of viewers, the subtitle service providers face an issue. Either the subtitles will move too fast for viewers or the dialogue in the video will creep ahead of the subtitles. So trustworthy video subtitling service providers ensure to tackle this issue by planning.
Multiple speakers
This one can make the process of subtitling much trickier. The translators have to subtitle the video in a way that can help the viewers to understand which speaker is delivering the given dialogue. Moreover, they have to make sure that the viewers can read a dialogue before the next one appears on the screen. This issue becomes worse with fast-paced conversations, arguments, debates, and more that include several people. But again, planning helps a lot.
Style
Recreating the style of the videos including films and advertisements is a challenge for the translators. There can be a friendly tone or a highly characterized speaker. When there are multiple speakers, there is a need to capture their different personalities.
Choice of font
Right fonts play a vital role in any subtitling project. The translators’ first priority is to make sure that the text is always legible for different screen sizes at an adequate distance. A viewer with a smartphone has a much smaller display however they experience a significantly closer view than someone watching a 4KHD TV. Text size is also a key consideration. You may find some of the fonts naturally larger than others. Font weighing is also vital as letters that are too bold will be narrowly spaced and make the reading difficult.
All in all
This is what we could fit into this blog. There is a lot to consider when it comes to subtitling services. Apart from translation, the subtitling experts have to fit the text on the screen and match it to the footage. We hope that this blog has provided you with some helpful insights into the most common subtitling issues. If you have any further doubts pertaining to subtitling, get in touch with the experts right away.
