Translations and Subtitles for Sapling Pictures

It all started when Sapling Pictures, the best video production company in the Northern Virginia/Washington, D.C. area, got in touch with us to avail captioning services for their attractive videos. Sapling’s skill is storytelling through images. They are fast learners and love getting immersed in the amazing work of their clients, translating messages into images that turn heads, capture hearts, or tickle the funnies. It is worth mentioning that their video creation team has won the Emmy® award. They make your videos and virtual events into powerful marketing tools. Expanding their reach across language barriers with captions is their purpose for associating with us this time.

They were looking for a captioning company that accurately synchronizes the non-alphabetic characters with the audio. CaptioningStar was ready to handle this project as we understood the risk, and knew it was worth it. We missed the chance to prepare transcripts for Sapling as Keith Jordin, the executive creative director, provided us with the transcripts. The real challenge was to encode these transcripts to obtain captions with absolute synchronization to the audio. We also had to take care of the font, size, maximum number of characters per line, and punctuation. 

We worked on 83 files in 5 languages- Arabic, Japanese, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Korean. The total duration was around 151 minutes. They provided us with their dropbox link to download all their files. Understanding the volume of the project, Sapling opted for our standard turnaround time, which is 5-7 business days. Initially, they demanded the output files in SRT format. Thus we encoded captions and delivered all the files in SRT format. The real started here. When they checked the captions on their editor software, there were issues with the font used for the Japanese language. Their appearance on the screen was not perfect. 

The customer wanted KANJI fonts for the Japanese language. We worked on this font and later found that the SRT format files did not support this font for subtitles. After a thorough research by our production team, we figured out that the KANJI font for the Japanese language appeared on the VTT output format and not the SRT format. Few languages had non-alphabetic characters, and thus synchronization of the audio and video became tedious. With several do-overs on the time codes of the subtitles, we completed this project.

Let us admit, we did not take a chance to compromise the time and quality despite several do-overs. We know a day or two days of waiting could slow down their process, and thus we stuck to the standard turnaround time. Without any delay and several do-overs, we perfectly encoded subtitles to the videos, which were in absolute synchronization with the audio. The production executive delivered all the output files to the clients. We were happy to be part and parcel of this project as we made the video content accessible. Accessible videos make people perceive, understand, navigate, interact, and be active.