Video content is essential in today’s digital world. 52% of consumers want to see more videos from the businesses they support. However, today’s brands serve larger audiences than ever before. A consumer bases and potential employees may span across multiple continents. The global market means more and ever-growing opportunities, but it also means that companies need to reach audiences in multiple languages.
Reaching a diverse audience can be challenging. Fortunately, there are ways to bridge gaps and overcome language barriers. One such solution is multilingual transcription and captioning.
What is multilingual transcription?
Multilingual transcription services, also known as subtitling, can help businesses professionals translate their videos for audiences and employees who speak different languages. If your goal is to engage and grow audiences, multilingual transcription offers an effective way to reach global participants and drive communication with international employees. Additionally, multilingual transcription solutions can offer benefits what you might expect.
Here are five factors business professionals should consider when deciding if they need to provide multilingual captioning or foreign language transcription of their content.
1. They Increase Your International Reach
In today’s world, it’s increasingly common to share globally. Brands are drawing and aiming to attract more diverse audiences and need to cater their events and messaging to meet more international needs. Adding multilingual transcription or captions to presentations, events and brand videos can help engage international audiences much more effectively.
Just consider the number of foreign shows you can watch on Netflix thanks to captions. Also, if you’ve visited a foreign country, did you see many familiar products on their shelves? Understanding the wide reach of products and entertainment will help you understand that not offering multilingual captions means missing out on additional audiences and consumers.
It’s also especially important to consider that effective multilingual captions must retain the meaning and context of the original video or original speaker’s sentiment. Automated translation options aren’t always capable of picking up on these types of nuances. Using professionals to produce quality translations, multilingual transcripts and more will help prevent errors that could render the content useless. Remember that your content should be professional, regardless of the language, so it’s wise to put in the effort and investment to get it right.
2. They Drive Global Employee Communication
Aside from how you communicate with the public, look at your own team. More teams are operating globally and language barriers are common among employees. Captioning your Zoom calls with teammates and providing multilingual captions on videos can help ensure clear communication and bridge these gaps. Non-native speakers will be able to better comprehend and retain information that your C-suite and other leaders distribute. Plus, it provides all employees with a visual aid to help them better decipher different accents, dialects or terms used in other regions they may be unfamiliar with. As a result, these solutions can facilitate better communication, and smoother processes among your teams.
Captions will also help your employees overall even if you’re offering them in the same language as the speaker. It’s likely that your global team members often work remotely and need additional tools to comprehend the information you’re sharing. Also, captions and transcripts are helpful for settings where audiences are watching with the sound is not an option. Whether they’re working from a coffee shop or next to their children at home, offering captioning can help them participate without the sound. As an added benefit, studies show that captions can help everyone maintain their focus more effectively so that they don’t miss anything that their colleagues share during a meeting or presentation.
3. They Make Training More Engaging
Global businesses often have online training sessions for employees and want to offer the same training to employees globally. Providing employees with the option to read along with captions in their own language during their training can provide the flexibility they need and increase their level of focus and attention.
Additionally, your audience will appreciate it if you upload these videos on-demand with the option to view them with multilingual captions and transcripts of the dialogue. For example, 42% of employees would rather have flexible video options in addition to their live training meetings. These transcripts can also help to make your training videos searchable so that employees taking these sessions can go back and reference specific sections. With searchable transcripts, you can enter and search using key words, which is a boost to efficiency and productivity. Overall, studies indicate that captions increase watchtime, meaning that they’re effective at keeping employees engaged. If content is important enough to include in training sessions, it’s well-worth captioning it so that employees get the most from that video or live session.
4. They Ensure Greater Accessibility
Captioning and transcribing your business’s videos also improves accessibility for individuals with disabilities, including those who are Deaf and hard of hearing.
While captions promote inclusion and diversity initiatives, they’re also essential in scenarios where employees and consumers with disabilities need them to participate with equity. Such requirements are in the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and similar legislation passed in other countries where you may be operating. Multilingual captioning services that reach high accuracy levels allow all your employees and consumers globally to participate and comprehend your videos. Free, automatic built-in captioning tools often aren’t accessible since they often contain errors that minimize their effectiveness. It’s best to enlist an accessibility solution that helps your business reduce its vulnerability to lawsuits. Your employees and consumers will also appreciate your efforts to include them and their peers with equity.
5. They Can Improve Your Site SEO
Search engines can’t watch a video or listen to its audio. However, they can read text. Making your business’s videos more “visible” and readable to search engines will improve their SEO. Transcribing your video content and placing the transcripts on your site pages is one great way to improve your business’s SEO and discoverability.
By using multilingual transcription services, content creators can improve their videos’ ability to rank for keywords in different languages and international markets. Video transcripts allow potential customers to find videos quickly because they can search for keywords that appear in them. With 68% of site traffic coming from search engines, improving your business video’s SEO can bring in more visitors and lead to more business opportunities. Plus, taking that extra step to provide transcript translations means even greater discoverability internationally.
Multilingual Captioning Can Boost Your Business’s Success
With 78% of people watching online videos every week, it’s essential for business leaders to look for ways to enhance their videos and attract greater audiences. Incorporating captioning and transcription alone, plus in multiple languages, will help to tackle that feat and have a greater global footprint.
Employees want to work for businesses that are inclusive. Consumers also prefer to spend their money with brands that represent them and their values. Verbit is helping businesses meet these needs by making the videos they’re sharing both internally and externally more engaging and accessible. Verbit’s captions boost the accessibility of content while its interactive transcripts make it easier to engage with. Any business that isn’t using multilingual captioning and language transcription services is missing opportunities to connect with larger audiences. Contact Verbit to explore how these tools could fit into your current video and event strategies.