TRANSCRIPTION

The transcription consists of converting audio and video files into text.

There are several types of transcription, two of them are the most common literal transcription in which all the sounds, words, phrases, coughs, laughter, noises, etc. are transcribed. and the natural transcription that focuses on communicative discourse and excludes stuttering and other noises.

Interactive subtitles require a literal transcription completely faithful to the original words, the order of the words of the original and its structure must be maintained, it must maintain the order of words that the character uses even if he makes mistakes, no words should be added and must be 100% faithful to the communicative speech of the audio of the video.

COMPLETELY TEXTUAL TRANSCRIPTION (FULL VERBATIM - using exactly the same words; word for word)

General rules of transcription for interactive subtitles:

1) No sound events and descriptions of noises external to the speech (applause, steps, knocking on the door, rain, passing plane, etc.)
2) No comment on the states of mind of those involved (laughter, tears, screams, sighs, etc.)
3) No tags or labels of interlocutors (character1:, character2:, journalist:, interviewee:, speaker1:, speaker2:, etc.)
4) The transcription will be done in EE spelling. UU unless otherwise indicated.
5) Never summarize the speech in the audio you are transcribing.
6) Do not correct the mistakes made by the interlocutors.
7) Never use () instead of []
8) The expansions for "it's", "that's", "you've" and so on, are not considered errors, but it is preferable to transcribe them exactly as they are spoken. Example: if the speaker says "it's", it should be kept as "it's".
9) Never use exclamation marks.
10)10) Abbreviations and acronyms must not contain hyphens. Good: USA. Bad: U-S-A
11) Always investigate the appropriate capitalization, for example, iPhone, UCLA, SaaS
12)The percentages should be written as "%". Example: 2%, 50%. But if the speaker says "A small percentage of the respondents", never replace "percentage" with "%"
13)Always write links like this: www.facebook.com/clientpage in the same way as shown.
14)Use international monetary symbols to mark the coin (in most cases). Do this: $ 50, € 155. Standard abbreviations (USD, EUR) are also acceptable.
15) DO NOT write the quantities with words, example:
- Good: $ 195; Wrong: one hundred ninety-five dollars
- Proper names: Article III of the Constitution, Genesis 1: 1.
- Measures: 10 'x 4', 223 pounds, 6'4 "
16) Numbers
- Write in words the numbers from 0 to 9: zero, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine (this does not include phone numbers).
- Numbers from 10 onwards are written in numbers: 10, 11, 20, 25, 99, etc. Note: It is okay to break this rule if you improve readability or consistency (for example, in a list of elements)
- Thousands must be written in digits. Do this: 600,000; 5,000. Keep in mind that there is a difference between "thousand" (enunciation) and "thousand" (digits)
- Always specify large numbers such as "millions", "billions", "billions", etc. Do this: 40 million, 10 billion. Numbers less than 10 must be specified (two million).
- Hours of the day and dates: always capitalized AM and PM. Do this: 2:45 PM, 5:00 AM. When you use hour, spell the numbers: eleven o'clock, nine o'clock.
- The periods of time must be written with an apostrophe: '60s,' 70s; however, "that man is 70 years old" (without apostrophe)
- When the speaker uses symbols or equations (such as a math class) they should transliterate into words
17) The quotes
- Double quotes "" are used whenever there is a direct quotation. Example: She said, "Do not bother telling me." Appointments are entered by a comma, not two points.
- Internal dialogues are also seen as direct quotes. Example: And then I thought, "What if I can not do it?" (Notice how the question mark is inside the quote.) This is because the quote itself is a question, but if the rest of the sentence is a question that contains an appointment, then the question mark would be outside the quotes).
- Do not use quotes in indirect quotes (when the speaker paraphrases what has been said). Example: The man said he was in a hurry.
18) If there are vulgarities in the audio, transcribe them word by word.
19) Correct the serious phonetic and pronunciation errors that prevent readability or comprehension, use the correct word and spelling according to your audio context.
20) The text is transcribed exactly as it sounds and includes all the expressions of the speakers such as the following:
- Speech errors. "I went to the bank on Tu-Thursday."
- False beginnings "I, um, wanted- I wanted to be a musician."
- Stuff words like "like", "you know", "yeah", "mm hmm", "uh huh", "umm", "uh, um", "sort of", "so", "oh" etc.
- The words of the jargon such as gonna, wanna, gotta, kinda, 'cause, should be kept in the transcript. Besides "you know", "I mean" must also be transcribed.
- Stuttering and repetitions.
- Only use these forms for the affirmative / negative: Mm-hmm (affirmative) or Mm-mm (negative); Uh-huh (affirmative) or Uh-uh (negative)

SUBTITULATION

Subtitling consists of programming timestamps with absolute precision in order to synchronize the transcription of the audio corresponding to a small segment of the video in a legend.

The difficulty of the subtitling process depends on the kind of content of the video, the number of speakers, respect for the speakers' use of the word, the quality of the audio of the video and the speed of speaking of the interlocutors, among others, as well Tells the experience of the subtitler to make the timestamps in a balanced way and at the precise moment maintaining unity in the ideas of the speech.

General rules for subtitling:

1) In general, short and logical, grammatically correct subtitles are preferred. When a speaker uses conjunctions such as 'and', 'like' or 'but' to connect longer segments of thought, it is often a good idea to create subtitle divisions in those places.
2) Longer speeches should be separated into smaller paragraphs. Paragraphs must not have more than 500 symbols (approximately 100 words or 2-3 lines in the transcription tool).
3) Each sentence must end with a punctuation mark.
4) The beginning of each sentence must be in capital letters.
5) Use the word changes of the interlocutors to start new subtitles.

SRT FILES

The final result of transcription and subtitling for interactive subtitles must be an SRT file.

Subtitles in SRT format are saved in a plain text file, usually with UTF-8 (Unicode Transformation Format) encoding. They can not contain rich text, such as that generated by some text editors such as Word.

Apart from being in plain text, the "inside" of the SRT file has to have a specific structure.

For each block of text, a correlative whole number is assigned first. Next, the start time of our fragment is indicated, then the symbols ->, and then the exact time that our fragment ends. These times are expressed in hours, minutes, seconds and thousandths of a second. Finally we put the text of the fragment that has to be transcribed in that fraction of time that we have expressed, as can be seen in the following example:

1
00:01:05,000 –> 00:03:10,025
Good morning and welcome…

2
00:03:11,000 –> 00:03:15,035
Go forward please

Important: The name of our SRT file must be identical to the video we intend to subtitle, except in its extension. So, if we have a video file with the name MiVideo.mp4, our subtitle file should be called MiVideo.srt.

Do not apply special formats using the following encodings:

\N: Used to make a line break within the same subtitle fragment
Italics or italics: texto o {{i}}text{{/i}}
Bold: In texto o {{b}}text format{{/b}}
Underlined: In texto o {{u}}{{/u}}
Colors: In format

Also, do not apply the position of the text with these codes:

Upper Left = {\a5}
Superior Center = {\a6}
Top Right = {\a7}
Left Center = {\a9}
Center = {\a10}
Right Center = {\a11}
Bottom Left = {\a1}
Bottom Right = {\a3}

CONCLUSIONS

In conclusion preferably the transcription, subtitling and generation of the SRT file should follow these guidelines for the use of interactive subtitles, it is possible that you already have the SRT file of your video, if this is the case our team will review the document, the most important is that the transcription of the words is 100% literal and reliable with the corresponding spelling and grammar.

When we receive a third-party SRT file, we do not make spelling or grammar corrections and the final result of the interactive subtitles will be as they are in the SRT file that you provide.

This is why it is important that your transcription, subtitling and SRT file be done by professionals who know the language of your video.

INTERACTIVE SUBTITLE works with the best transcription, subtitling and translation companies all over the world, which allows us to have professional transcriptionists that meticulously fulfill our requirements for interactive subtitling in all languages.

Our team thoroughly reviews the delivery of the transcripts and returns the documents to 100% requirements for interactive language learning subtitles.

Our recommendation is that you rely on our team and allow us to lead the management of transcription, subtitling and SRT file of your videos to have the best possible result for the learning implementation of INTERACTIVE SUBTITLE.