How to Increase Your China Online Presence With Chinese Subtitling?

If you have a pile of English videos that you want to publish on Chinese video platforms and social media channels, adding Chinese subtitles is an efficient way to connect to a broader audience.

Whether it’s a promotional video, movie, or a training module, make sure that you have everything you need for Chinese video translation.

Learn why subtitles are essential for videos, which written language to use, and the services’ cost.

Types of videos and the use of Chinese subtitles

YouTube and Vimeo are not available in China, so the best way to get more viewers is through the local video platforms.

There are 850 million video users in China as of this writing. You can upload your videos on iQiyi, Youku, and Tencent Video, the leading video platforms.

It doesn’t matter what industry you are in — as long as your video content can educate, promote, entertain the audience, you’re off to a great start.

• Educational — videos are a great way to educate leads and clients about your products and services. Learning doesn’t have to be boring for viewers. You can be as creative with your video as to how Adir Winery did it. One of Israel’s famous wine companies shared how they harvest wine in a short 11-minute video with Chinese subtitles.

• Promotional — use videos to promote your brand by sharing a little bit of information about your history, producing products, and unique selling points. Schwartz did this on their video together with Chinese subtitles.

• Entertainment — if you’re publishing movies, animations, and other short films, you can gain more exposure to Chinese audiences by adding voice-overs and subtitling in Chinese. Here’s how one of our animation projects in Mandarin voice-over.

What type of Chinese subtitles should you use?

There are only two options here — Simplified or Traditional Chinese. Your choice of written language is based on your target audience. For example, if your viewers are in Mainland China and Singapore, you’d be better off with Simplified Chinese.

However, if your viewers are based in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau, Traditional Chinese is the best option.

So, decide which target audience and locale you want to focus on because the written language should be appropriate for the viewers.

What factors affect the cost of Chinese subtitling services?

So, you know what type of video you want and the written form you can use.

There are several factors to consider when it comes to the rates of Chinese subtitling services, such as:

• Deadline — some agencies charge an extra fee for rush projects or same-day deliverables.
• Volume — if you have a large volume of work, you’re entitled to get discount prices, especially if it’s a long-term project.
• Source language — if your source language isn’t English, there are additional charges. For example, Korean to Chinese subtitles or German to Chinese.
• Complexity — depends on the subject matter’s complexity, especially if it requires accurate translation and transcription.
• Length — short videos from 1- 10 minutes have lower costs than films. It can even be delivered within the next 24 hours, but different agencies have different terms and offers.

On top of these factors, the scope of work is a contributing factor to rates.

• Template-based — if there’s a template, the team can do translation and subtitle development.
• No template — the team has to conduct translation, time coding, and subtitling development.
• Script-based — the team will adapt the texts, work on the time coding, and subtitling development.
• No script — the team has to transcribe the source video, then translate, and then time coding as well on top of the subtitling.

What’s the difference between Chinese subtitling and closed captioning?

Make sure that your videos can cater to a wide range of audiences, whereas you can choose between subtitling and closed captioning.

Subtitling includes video translation only where the audio is transcribed and then translated and added to the video according to the timestamp. Subtitles are helpful for viewers who are watching videos, not in their native language. They can still understand the videos through the subtitles.

Meanwhile, with closed captioning, the process is almost entirely the same with subtitling. But there’s a particular purpose — it caters to the deaf and hard of hearing. The subtitling difference is that closed captions include the background sound effects and speaker identifications. It’ll be easier for them to understand, together with what’s happening in the video, with the sound effects.

Get started with Chinese subtitle services with your videos

Chinese subtitles are necessary these days in videos as people would like to read and watch at the same time, enabling you to help them in understanding what you’re communicating.

The videos can be in a promotional video, educational, entertainment, and general use. What’s important is the audio is transcribed, translated, and encoded into the video so viewers can read in the target language, for instance, Simplified or Traditional Chinese.

The rates for subtitling may differ since there are several factors involved. What’s more, if you want to reach your audience effectively, including the deaf and hard of hearing, you can choose closed captioning for your videos.

If you need help in any of these two, send us a message, and we will send a custom quote for what you need.