Are subtitles the secret to editing foreign language videos?
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Dom Bourne February 16, 2021
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When the world remembers 2020, it's unlikely that the Academy Awards will spring to mind. They'd barely finished rolling up the (soggy) red carpet when Covid-19 commanded our attention, and we thought of little else for the rest of the year. But in some ways the awards were a harbinger of what was to come: Netflix earned more nominations than any of the traditional movie studios (that have since suffered from worldwide theatre shutdowns) and PARASITE became the first non-English language film in Oscar history to win the award for Best Picture (in a year where TV and streaming audiences turned to foreign language programming to fill the content gap created by lockdowns.)
Now, as production starts up again and travel restrictions ease, the increased appetite for global stories and demand for factual content means that more production teams are facing the challenge of creating video content in foreign languages. And, while shooting interviews with people that don't speak your language can be as easy as getting someone on location to act as an interpreter, post producing thi content isn't as simple - partly because editing requires very precise video translation and partly because it's such a time-consuming process. So, how have post-production teams tackled this problem in the past and what is the best way to edit foreign language videos? We've explored the pros and cons of different approaches so that you can choose the best solution for your production.
data-src=https://gcs.creativecow.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/16172132/adding-subtitles-to-video-rushes-makes-foreign-language-footage-more-accessible1200-1024x683.jpg alt= class=lazyload wp-image-2403914 data-srcset=https://gcs.creativecow.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/16172132/adding-subtitles-to-video-rushes-makes-foreign-language-footage-more-accessible1200-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://gcs.creativecow.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/16172132/adding-subtitles-to-video-rushes-makes-foreign-language-footage-more-accessible1200-300x200.jpg 300w, https://gcs.creativecow.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/16172132/adding-subtitles-to-video-rushes-makes-foreign-language-footage-more-accessible1200-768x512.jpg 768w, https://gcs.creativecow.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/16172132/adding-subtitles-to-video-rushes-makes-foreign-language-footage-more-accessible1200-624x416.jpg 624w, https://gcs.creativecow.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/16172132/adding-subtitles-to-video-rushes-makes-foreign-language-footage-more-accessible1200.jpg 1200w data-sizes=(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px />1) Option 1: Hire a multilingual post-production team.
Arguably the holy grail of editing foreign language content is to find an editor or post-production assistant that speaks both your language, and the language spoken by your interviewee, fluently. This should mean that you won't need to make any changes to your workflow and can get maximum efficiency from your team and resources. But this approach can severely limit the talent pool available for your production. What are the chances of finding an editor that meets all your creative and logistic requirements and also speaks the languages your interviewees speak? This is particularly unlikely if you're working with languages that aren't widely spoken or if you're working with different dialects. There's also a big difference between speaking a language, being fluent in it and being bilingual. As the producers of the documentary Beside the Golden Door discovered, when you're editing sensitive or complex content, you can't risk working with people that aren't professional translation service providers.
2) Option 2: Bring a video translator into the edit suite.
Hiring a professional translator to sit alongside your editor will undoubtably provide language accuracy, but at what cost? Having a language expert on hand for the entire edit means that your post-production team can cut with confidence - splicing sentences together and extracting segments without compromising the integrity of the language or the storyline. But besides being a luxury that few productions can afford, this approach also doesn't provide a language solution for logging or any other edit prep. Your post-production is going to take longer and become even more expensive if you're only able to start reviewing your rushes and working on the storyline when you get into the edit suite.
Finally, as cloud editing is increasingly adopted, there's the question of how video translators would sit in on remote edits.
Another limitation for both this and option 1 is that they're only viable if you're editing content in one language. If you're editing footage that includes a variety of different languages, then you'll either have to find multilingual talent or split the work across teams with different language skills.
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Are subtitles the secret to editing foreign language videos? 
