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Today, many businesses use videos to market their products/services, explain their features, train employees or cascade development plans among departments. Although it is an important communication channel, videos on its own can sometimes be quite insufficient. Imagine attending an online conference listening to a speaker with a hard-to-understand accent. Challenging, isn’t it? Now imagine that among the audience of this conference, you have a colleague who does not even speak this language. In this scenario, captions will help the speaker ensure delivering his/her message to all native speaker attendees, while subtitles will help communicate this message to non-native audience.
It is the same when it comes to videos. Without subtitles and captions videos can sometimes be confusing. Therefore, it is good to add captions and subtitles to your videos. There are many factors defining the importance of subtitles and captions, but to know these factors, we should first learn about the differences between captions and subtitles.
Subtitles vs. Captions
Many people confuse captions and subtitles. Although both can be used in the same video, they are technically different. Captioning services provide a transcript for the dialogue between characters, while subtitling services are mainly about translating this dialogue. If you are an English speaker watching a BBC documentary with English transcript of the dialogue on screen, you are enjoying captions. But, if you are non-English speaker seeing the on-screen writing of the dialogue in your language, you are benefiting from subtitling. As a business owner, you can use both services if your video includes multilingual dialogue.
The Importance of Subtitles and Captions
Subtitling and captioning are important to use in your videos for several reasons. They help you deliver your message to your target audience whatever the aim of the video is. There are several scenarios for which you need to contact a subtitling company and obtain captioning and subtitling services.
Literacy & Language Learning
One of the main reasons for the importance of subtitles and captions is learning. If your business is related to eLearning and e-education, captioning and subtitling services are a must have. With captioning, you can facilitate literacy development as you allow children to build their reading skills. Captioning a video also helps the audience better comprehend this video, pay more attention to it, and most of all remember it.
Moreover, you can use captioning to help your language trainees. Providing caption helps language learners to recognize words, phonics, and structure; improve their reading skills; as well as catch up with the spoken language.
On the other hand, subtitling helps you deliver efficient eLearning video content to your learners worldwide.
Boosting Views of Your Videos
The importance of subtitling and captioning extends to increasing video reach. Through captioning and subtitling, you can have more text in the video content. Your partnered subtitling company uses the opportunity to boost the content’s site engine optimization (SEO). This way, captions and subtitles allow search engines to recognize your video, granting you a bigger number of views.
Enhancing Business on Social Media
The numbers of social media channels users are continuously increasing. Statistics show that the number of Facebook monthly active users reached 2.6 billion people around the world as of Q1 2020. The biggest number of these users are in India. Thus, posting online videos about your service helps you market this service to a wide scope of people. Meanwhile, captioning and subtitling your videos are considered a smart move for growing your business as you reach online audiences in different countries around the world. This way, through increasing the potential targeted clients, you have a good chance to grow your business.
Improve User Experience
Another importance of subtitles and captions is to give your audience a perfect experience. Data showed that around 85% of Facebook users view videos without sound, according to American Press Institute. That means, if you want to reach a wider scope of people on social media, you need to use either captioning or subtitling services, based on your target audience.
Not only on Facebook, but on many channels, people prefer watching videos without sound. This depends on the audience circumstances and preference. Providing your audience with the option to watch the video or just read the captions will guarantee that more people stay till the end of the video. Additionally, providing subtitles when you are launching your video to your audience in another country guarantees that they will enjoy the whole experience of the video.
Better Access for Hearing-Impaired Audience
Among adults worldwide, around 15% of people have some hearing loss degree. After counting children the number drops to 5.3% of the world’s population, according to the European Federation of Hard of Hearing People (EFHOH). Therefore, as you try to deliver your video’s content to all audiences, you must consider hearing-impaired people as well. Launching a video that has either captions or subtitles enables your audience who have hearing difficulties to enjoy your video, receive your message, and interact with it.
The importance of subtitles and captions goes beyond just entertainment. It is crucial for learning reasons and for your business growth. Captioning and subtitling services alike guarantee your video to deliver its message by reaching more audience and maximize its success.
bayantech provides you with professional captioning and subtitling services to increase the reach of your video and accurately deliver your message.
Contact us now to discuss your project’s requirements.
