Concept
If your audience is international, making your closed captions available in multiple languages can give your business a keen edge.
IBM’s Video Streaming service gives you several options to have closed captions in many languages. Choose the one that’s right for you.
Watson’s US English (online method)
As you might expect, Watson’s default transcription language is US English. Once you have Watson create the original transcription in English, you can translate into other languages through:
- Using Watson Video Enrichment translations (another product in the Watson Media family). Ask for details.
- Downloading Watson’s transcription and sending it to your existing translation service
Multilingual captions (offline method)
You can download Watson’s transcription in the industry-standard .vtt file format. (VTT is the WebVTT or “video text tracks format”.) Once you have the .vtt file, you can edit the file offline. Or you can send it out for translation.
A VTT file shows the caption text in relation to timecode. Both the timecode and the relationship of each line to the timecode are critical. Here’s an example:
You would ask your translation service to make a line-by-line replacement, like the example above. While there are VTT editor programs, you can use a simple text editor to open, modify and save the file.
Watson’s multilingual transcription (other spoken languages)
Watson has other transcription languages. The current library includes Arabic, Chinese, English (UK), English (US), French [Parisian], Japanese, Portuguese [Brazil] and Spanish. Remember that these are transcriptions of the spoken language in the videos. (As noted earlier, translation is possible using Watson Video Enrichment.)
Interactive example
The sample video below has three closed caption languages. As the video plays, use the cc function and then switch between languages. We accomplished this using the offline edit method. Explore…!