Captions And Subtitles: What’s the difference?

If you are a movie fanatic or a random video clicker in your favorite platforms like Youtube, for sure, you have encountered the terms captions and subtitles. But have you ever wondered the difference between these two? Most often, people confused these words as synonymous.

Closed captions and subtitles have similarities making it slightly tricky for someone with no previous knowledge identifying the differences. However, they have relatively separate attributes as they work for different goals. While both appear as on-screen text, they intend to produce content available to various audiences for diverse reasons.

Learning the difference between subtitles and closed captions is essential because it enables video creators to pick the right choice concerning the audience they aspire to captivate, the outcomes they are aiming to achieve, and the means they require to follow. For audiences outside of the subtitling business, only a few are understood about subtitling and closed captioning contrasts. Still, to those operating with video production, services for the deaf, subtitle translations, broadcasting, and subtitles for video-on-demand settings, the distinctions can be sharply defined.

How both differ?

Subtitles and captions differ in many directions. Although both are texts or words that appear on screens, they vary in their descriptions and designated purposes.

Open and Closed Captions (CC)

Captioning allows even those who are deaf or hard of hearing to enjoy and understand the video. It accomplishes this by implementing text versions of the spoken audio such as conversations, narrative or voice-over in the video record, and background noises, soundtracks, speaker distinction, and other associated audio elements.

There are actually two types of captions, the open captions and closed captions. Open captions cannot be turned on/off, implying that they are embedded in the video file. On the other hand, closed captions can be turned on or off and has separate files on their own.

Captions began in the early 70s in the US to help the deaf and hard of hearing watching television. Back then, only open captions were accessible.

Captions facilitate viewers to understand every audio in the video, which includes non-speech sounds. Unlike subtitles, their primary purpose is not to translate the vocalized audio into another language, but somewhat to improve the overall-video watching experience for the whole audience, even for those with hearing impediments.

Subtitling

Subtitles are defined as text alternatives of the articulated dialogue in the video. It is mainly utilized for translation purposes so that audiences outside the country of origin can understand its content. It is a timed transcription of the audio from video footage that emerges on the screen. Whether it is the exchange between the actors, a speech, or a voice-over, subtitles present the text version.

The use of Subtitles commences somewhere in the 1930s when audio films began becoming famous. They were used to help foreign viewers understand the movie by producing text translation of the spoken audio. Until today, the principal purpose of subtitling is to translate spoken audio in videos into another language that aimed viewers to comprehend.

Subtitles, unlike captions, assume that the viewer doesn’t have any hearing difficulties and completely transcribes the audio files for translation purposes. For this matter, only the spoken audio is covered in subtitles.

The Cost Difference

Cost is a vital factor in the distinction between subtitles and closed captions. Typically, captions are more expensive than subtitles. It is because of the additional effort and attention exerted in the transcription method and timings. As closed captions are usually included as part of management, broadcasters often have requirements and guidelines on particular formatting, styles, and additions required to be adhered to. Seizing these guidelines can capture a lot of skill from subtitlers and time consumed in creating client-specific templates. For subtitles, styles and directions often diverge from project to project and are most likely more manageable. Fewer guidelines, formatting, and writing skills required equals lower costs.

But with today’s technology, there are several auto subtitling and captioning tools available in the market. It, for sure, can lessened expenses and can do work faster, which means more production. Even though accuracy is not guaranteed 100%, but still reduces time and money spent. Surely, a miles difference comparing to captioning and subtitling manually.

Auto video subtitles generator nowadays is seen as an essential tool to content marketers, and to common vloggers, aiming to make their viewers well learned about what their content is all about.

Why businesses need captions and subtitles for their brand?

The primary goal of a business is to attain a wider audience. The availability of video captions empowers you to win new viewers into your present audience, who would contrarily not understand your video content because of hearing disabilities. You now include viewers with problems in processing speech or audible components in a video and those of people who don’t understand the language used.

Subtitles proceed a step further to initiate your video content to the worldwide audience. About 80% of YouTube viewers are from outside the United States. It means, if you can advance the market of the other over two billion non-English speakers who are available online, then your video’s return of investment is way much better. That is how the entertainment business both films and TV shows avail and profit from the application of subtitles and captions.

Captions and subtitles also aid in improving your audience engagement and viewing activity. Captioned videos have a 40% increase in views, while those including both subtitles and captions earn 80% more viewers. Moreover, Facebook’s internal investigations found a 12% improvement in video ads’ engagement with captions. 85% of Facebook video content is seen in mute mode.

The development in engagement triggers extra notable benefit, which is search engine optimization. Google’s bots inspect comments, retweets, likes, shares as a pointer of quality, and valuable content. Therefore, boost your search results.

Subtitle and caption text allow those bots to crawl the video content in the text version, and rank the video appropriately. That helps to improve your video’s discoverability, produce more organic traffic, boost engagement, and ultimately drive sales percentage. That is why companies who embrace video marketing prioritize subtitling and captioning their content to ensure that their targeted audience clearly understands their brand’s voice.