Chinese Video Subtitling, Video Captioning, and Voice-over: What’s Best for Your Marketing Needs

Thinking of enhancing your videos’ features to match the needs of your target audience in China? Then you might want to consider Chinese video subtitling, video captioning, and voice-overs. Although some may think they’re almost the same, they’re different regarding their purposes. On top of that, various Chinese video specialists handle each project differently because of the production workflow. In this article, we will explore how each one can improve videos to win customers and, at the same time, their best use according to your campaigns.

Chinese video subtitling for promotional campaigns, movies, and educational videos

Chinese video subtitles are the most common type of enhancement for videos to understand the content better. If you’re targeting a non-English speaking audience, you can add subtitles to your videos, translated from the source language to the target language that the audience understands. You may see these if you’re watching Netflix movies. You can choose subtitles in Chinese, Korean, Spanish, and more.

Businesses and non-profit organizations use subtitles by translating them from English to Chinese to promote campaigns and launch informational and educational videos to Chinese audiences. The primary purpose of subtitling is that the audience will understand the content in their native language. Usually, the subtitles are already embedded into the videos. The audio content must be transcribed first in English and then translated to Chinese.

Chinese voice-overs for marketing purposes

Chinese voice-overs are translated audios from English or a source language so that the Chinese audience can understand the audio in their language. They can be paired up with Chinese subtitles so that the viewers can also read what’s going on. However, the voice-overs can also be standalone, which means the audience can still understand the video even if they don’t have subtitles. The audio is well in sync with what the speaker is saying and acting out in the video.

Chinese voice-overs consist of transcribed audio that is translated. They can be in Mandarin voice-over or Cantonese voice-over, depending on the target audience of the company. Mandarin is the lingua franca in Mainland China, whereas people in Hong Kong and Guangdong province use Cantonese. Companies who want to launch marketing campaigns have to know the language that their audience speaks so they can apply the voice-overs appropriately.

Chinese video captioning to enhance overall video watching experience

Captioning works best for videos that the deaf and hard-of-hearing people watch. Some may mistakenly think captioning is the same as subtitling, but they are somewhat different. Captioning provides text versions of the entire video, including the dialogues, narration, sound effects, speaker differentiation, and background noises. In short, everything that’s going on in the video. Subtitles, on the other hand, only include the audio of the video primarily.

There are two types of captioning: closed and open. When you watch a movie on Netflix, you may find these closed captions, which you can turn off or on. The closed captions can be turned on and off in the video and have a separate file. Open captions are embedded in the video, and you can’t turn them on or off. Video captioning doesn’t work for translation purposes, but more on enhancing viewers’ watching experience.

Are you interested in multilingual translation services? Click here for more information.