Subtitling or captioning is an important aspect of an audio-visual experience. It helps your content reach a wider audience, especially people who are not familiar with the language or are hard of hearing. If you are an online marketer, transcripts or subtitles have a very important role to play from SEO point of view as well. Needless to say that a subtitle can only be useful when it is accurate, else all your effort despite your noble intention is bound to fail.
Why is accuracy important?
Accurate transcription is often the first step to an impeccable subtitling, because the transcripts are used for creating and synchronising the captions. According to FCC, “Captions must match the spoken words in the dialogue, in their original language (English or Spanish), to the fullest extent possible.” Correctness of a transcript does not only refer to its grammar, spelling, and punctuation, but also includes non-speech sounds such as a music playing, an off-screen whistle if that is important to the plot, people clapping, and the likes. In fact, the FCC’s new caption quality standards make it essential to capture non-speech sounds.
Transcription service Vs. automatic speech recognition
When you upload a video on YouTube, you can use their automatic captioning function to add subtitles to your video. While this might look like the best solution as far as cost is considered, sadly, that is not the case. These kinds of programs come with questionable accuracy levels, which apart from causing you embarrassment, might also be detrimental to the SEO strategy of your video. In fact, Google can even mark your website as ‘pure spam’, a term it uses to define a “site that appears to use aggressive spam techniques such as automatically generated gibberish” among many other things. Since reports say that a transcript is only 60 to 70 percent correct when using an automatic speech recognition technique, your captions will have 1 in every 3 words wrong, and might appear as gibberish to Google.
Hiring the best transcription service is beneficial at many levels. If you are looking for one, look no further than Scribie. With years of experience and a team of experts, we offer a quality that makes us proud and our customers happy. Start uploading your files today!