Closed Captions vs. Narrative Subtitles
By Clara Garcia
Dotsub provides different kinds of captions, which adapt to your needs. Choosing which one is best for you is simple if you keep your intended audience in mind.
Dotsub’s 508 Compliant captions -commonly referred to as captions for the hearing impaired- follow the rules set by the Described and Captioned Media Program (DCMP) funded by the U.S. Department of Education and administered by the National Association of the Deaf. These include spoken audio, speaker identification, on screen text and “descriptions of audio” that give the hearing impaired the full experience of the video content. So sound effects that are not necessarily spoken out by your protagonists are included in the captions.
Here is an example. Michael Smolens, Chairman and Founder of Dotsub, had given quite a speech that brought his audience into applause. Such applause is included in the captions:
In contrast, Dotsub’s narrative subtitles -also referred to as “broadcast-style subtitles”- are typically used for a different purpose: films, documentaries, etc. to be translated into another language/s or videos used for learners of English as a second-language. In this case, only spoken language is captioned, together with titles and other important pieces of on-screen text that would need to be translated for the audience to understand the storyline.
Here you have an example of narrative subtitle of Peter Crosby, Chief Revenue Officer of Dotsub, talking about our mission:
And those very same subtitles were translated into Simplified Chinese:
You can of course also have your 508 Compliant captions translated into any language you need – the choice is yours. Dotsub is here to help you reach a global audience!