Do you remember the ‘Meet Me at Starbucks’ campaign, a successful global multilingual video marketing campaign launched by Starbucks? If not, it featured a combination of short clips of Starbucks customers showing their experiences in the popular coffeehouse from 28 countries in their native language. It garnered more than 91 million social media impressions. This is the power of multilingual video marketing.
Is your brand lost in translation to market in different languages? Then multilingual video marketing campaigns can become crucial for your business to capture local markets. Thanks to affordable smartphones and data plans, there has been a rise of digital users in tier 2 and tier 3 cities who are largely non-English speaking users.
However, crafting a solid multilingual video marketing strategy can be a struggle in any business’s marketing efforts. One of the solutions businesses have been adopting is the use of multilingual captions in videos.
News channels use live multilingual captioning to provide an inclusive viewing experience for audiences speaking different languages and movies and advertisements use post-production multilingual captioning to capture the descriptions, line breaks, readability, and timing of the spoken language and sound effects. But what are multilingual captions? Let’s understand it a bit more.
What are Multilingual Captions?
Captions are a textual transcript of a video’s dialogue, actions, sound effects, or music. Solutions such as Reverie’s Speech-to-text API provide real-time captions for websites, social media, applications, and videos. An example of a caption in a video would be if someone opens the door, the caption would read: [Door Opens]
Apart from the actions, captions also translate languages, background sounds, and environmental noises in the video enhancing the viewer’s experience.
Multilingual captioning takes this step further by translating the original captions into different languages. Take the same example as above for instance. Its translation into Hindi would be: [दरवाजा खुलता है]
This would be a highlight in your marketing efforts for Hindi-speaking customers. But enabling captions in your marketing efforts requires strategic steps from understanding the target language to getting feedback from users.
Also read: Captioning vs Subtitling: Breaking Down the Differences
Steps to Enable Multilingual Captions In Your Videos
- Understanding the Target Language
Before you plan to enable captions in your videos, study your target market and identify the languages most relevant to them. Initially, you don’t have to spend time and effort to caption all the official languages in your videos. Note down the selected languages that your customers use and enable them in your videos.
- Choosing the Right Platforms
Videos can be uploaded and consumed on multiple platforms like websites, social media, and video-sharing platforms like YouTube. All of them have options for multilingual captions. Study which platforms your customers are using the most. For example, if your customers are using Instagram as a tool to consume videos, select Instagram as your platform and start running your video marketing campaigns with multilingual captions to increase your reach.
- Crafting Compelling Transcriptions
Invest in high-quality language technology solutions like Reverie’s speech-to-text API which can be easily integrated into websites, applications, and other platforms and provide highly accurate transcriptions in 11 Indian languages. Partnering with a proficient language technology solution helps you with accurate and real-time captions, data security, customer support, and high scalability, enabling you to handle high volumes of content to transcript.
- User Feedback and Updation
Encourage feedback from your diverse audience. Actively seek input on the quality and relevance of multilingual captions through surveys in their language and use this feedback to refine your approach and continually improve. This helps to improve customer satisfaction, understand your customer’s requirements, provide them with higher-quality services, and to be future ready to expand to more localities.
Are you considering enabling multilingual captions in your video marketing efforts? If yes then there are certain practices you need to adhere to capture your target audience successfully. Let’s have a look at them.
Best Practices for Multilingual Captions
Maintain Consistency Across Languages and Elements
Consistency is key when displaying captions in multiple languages in your video. If your captions are incoherent then it negatively affects your users’ viewing experience. Ensure visual consistency in terms of font styles, colours, and text placement across different languages and elements such as background noises and environmental sounds. For example, if there are multiple languages spoken in the video, make sure the font and colour of each language are unique. This creates a cohesive and professional look for your content and increases the video’s viewing experience.
Consider Reading Speed of Different Languages
Different languages may have varying reading speeds. Reading captions in one language may take a longer time than reading captions in another language. Through user feedback and updates, adjust the duration of captions to accommodate the natural pace of each language, ensuring that the viewers can comfortably read and comprehend the content.
Provide Language Options
It’s called ‘multilingual captions’ for a reason. Your source language can be unified across certain videos but allow users to select their preferred language for captions. This empowers them to interact with the content in their specific language which enhances their understanding and engagement with the content.
Accessibility Considerations
Your reach with multilingual captions will increase if your captions are accessible to individuals with disabilities such as users who are deaf. Captions are widely considered a part of accessibility that are designed to access aural information in identical language with elements such as speaker identification and sound descriptions. This includes providing options for closed captions, and ensuring the text is clear, readable, and complies with accessibility standards.
Transform Your Audio Into Text With Reverie’s Speech-to-Text API
Reverie’s speech-to-text API helps provide real-time captions for your customers increasing your accessibility and reach. Businesses can reap benefits in their multilingual marketing efforts by getting highly accurate captions in over 11 languages.
Enable multilingual captions with speech recognition that accurately converts spoken words into text, and with our real-time transcriptions get instantaneous conversion of live speech into text. Embrace the power of marketing through multilingual captions with Reverie.
