Like many things, the hard work that goes into video translation services is often lost on the audience. However, this is the sign of a great video translation services project, where your audience is so engrossed in your content they barely notice anything has been translated at all.
It’s no small task to achieve this kind of video translation services quality though. Here at translate plus, we have an entire team of experts to make this happen and today we want to share with you some of the biggest challenges they have to overcome on every project.
#1: Video translation services and pacing
Whether you go for subtitles or voice overs, one of the biggest challenges your translators will face is matching the pace of your original dialogue. Natural speech tends to be pretty fast and this can be particularly challenging to keep up with when it comes to subtitles.
It also takes the viewer longer to read text than it does to hear and comprehend audio. So fast moving subs aren’t much of a solution to keeping up with the dialogue in your video.
If subtitles simply can’t keep up, then your only option may be voice over translation services. Even in this case there can be challenges. Sentences in English are often shorter than they are in other languages, which means your translators and voice over artists need to find the right pace between them.
#2: Screen space
If you take the subtitles approach, this is a problem you’ll run into sooner or later. Spoken words take up no screen space whatsoever but subtitles only have so much room to work with. Things get even more complex, too, when you consider text expansion – something that happens when your translated languages need more space to say the same thing.
This is frustratingly common in video translation services.
Combine this with the pacing challenge we mentioned earlier and your subtitle team has a tough task on their hands. Aside from keeping up with the dialogue in your video, their subs need to be short enough to read quickly and fit on the screen, without moving so fast that readers can’t keep up themselves.
#3: Multiple speakers
Video translation services get really tricky when there are multiple speakers talking over each other. Subtitles quickly become difficult to read and even voice overs are a challenge when speakers start interrupting each other.
Assigning a voice over artist to each speaker helps a lot in this scenario but it can be difficult to replicate something like a heated debate organically. Especially in a way that can be easily heard and understood by audiences in another language.
How difficult your own video translation services project will be, depends on the nature of your footage. Videos with very little dialogue or text are naturally much easier to translate but things become more complex as the volume of either increases – not to mention the length of your video itself.
There’s no need to panic though. We’ve got a full team of language experts and technical pros that can help you decide upon the best approach for translating your video projects. All you need to do is get in touch with our team and we’ll be more than happy to give you the advice you need.