On completion of this training sequence,
you will be able to discipline yourself to practice and improve skills
like correcting errors in the subtitles for several purposes,
depending on the working context.
In particular, you are going to learn how to quickly correct a transcript,
how to create a full transcript for different professional purposes,
like the proceedings of a conference, a full report, or the minutes of a meeting,
and finally you will learn how to create a transcript
that can be used to subtitle a video.
This is the agenda.
After the meeting,
your client may ask you to provide them with the text of your subtitles.
However, it is important to first educate your client about what to expect.
Live subtitles are indeed for communication purposes,
not a full transcript.
It may contain mistakes.
Plus, this is considered by some colleagues as an extra service
that the client should pay for.
If you decide you are going to give them the transcript as per the subtitles,
it might be necessary to correct them.
The quickest and easiest way to do it is using a spell check.
For example, within Microsoft Word.
This will allow you to avoid spelling mistakes,
which are the first criterion clients use to assess the quality of your job.
However, the subtitles may contain proper names, technical names and realia.
If correctly introduced during the pre editing phase,
there should be no problem with that.
However, you may have made a mistake sooner or later.
Furthermore, the pre editing work is rarely exhaustive
and some new names may have been pronounced during the event.
In case of proper names, you can always ask participants directly or the organisers
or you can do a quick research on the Internet.
After that, I always do a grammar check as well,
as some sentences may contain grammar mistakes that the spell check does not spot.
When correcting a sentence,
make sure you understand or remember the meaning of that sentence
and avoid inventing things that have not been said.
In the doubt, leave it out.
Before giving the transcript to my clients,
I usually also care of the layout as it always gives a positive impression.
In particular, I care about the character size and font, the spacing, the paragraphing
and I finally give a title to the transcript.
Don't forget to recall your client you did this service,
by introducing your name either at the beginning or end of the document
or by personalising the document's heading or footing.
You may be interested in creating a template file
so as to avoid having to redo it all the time.
These three steps will allow you to be sure you are providing the client with a product
that contains all important concepts, without evident mistakes, and nice to look at.
If the text should be improved even further
because your client wants a full transcript for whatever professional purpose,
then you need to ask them a copy of the event videorecording.
Depending on how much you quoted this service,
you first need to understand how much time you want to spend on that
and schedule your time accordingly.
Then, you can simultaneously listen to the recording
and check the text of your subtitles to optimise your job.
As in the case of a draft,
check whether all messages are there, that spelling and grammar are correct
and that the layout allows for good readability. ​
Besides that, spend more time understanding
if you did not miss any secondary piece of information,
as this is the basis for any full report.​
Depending on the working context,
you may need to create a full transcript for several purposes,
like conference proceedings, parliamentary reporting,
creating the minutes of a meeting, the syllabus of a class.
In any case, remember that these are professional products
and that you do a different job.
So, unless you have a training in these fields,
avoid presenting your full transcript as a report, as a syllabus,
as the minutes of a meeting or the proceedings of a conference.
What you can do instead is to provide the client with a usable text
that is going to facilitate the job of the professional
caring about the final result.
Proceedings are the text published by the organisers of a conference
to record what has been said by speakers.
Normally, they either ask speakers directly to provide a written version of their speech,
or they may ask you to go for that, to then ask speakers for a final check.
In this case, go for grammatically correct sentences,
and avoid repeating every single verbal and nonverbal utterance,
as the content is more important.
Remember that proceedings are not a word for word rendition of what was said.
Because of a difference between the spoken form and the written form of many languages,
it is advisable to care of the form
and avoid writing down every single sound that comes out of the mouth of the speakers.
By doing this, you will also avoid to spend too much time on that.
You can even leave a comment to the speaker
in case of doubts or evident inconsistencies.
In the case of the minutes of a meeting,
again content is more important than form, so go for the essential.
However, in a meeting, decisions are taken,
so avoid leaving out things that you simply did not understand.
Again, leave a message to the user of your transcript
to inform them about that.
Finally, in the case of a parliamentary report,
form is most important.
Be accurate and avoid reformulating sentences only because you would word them differently
or because they sound odd and avoid correcting an MP bad grammar.​
In general, it may happen
that the subtitles contain a lot of reformulation or not all concepts.
In this case, you can even think of redoing the transcript from scratch,
as it is sometimes less time consuming than checking and completing a text
that does not really match the original speech.​
A special case is your client requesting a subtitle file or a subtitled video.
A subtitle file is a synchronized text file
that can be added to a video to come to a subtitled video.
A subtitled video is a video with open subtitles or closed subtitles.
As in the previous case, this is a job for professionals.
However, you can always facilitate the subtitler job
by producing a transcript that is usable.
Some online video-sharing platforms even have a system
that allows you to upload a transcript,
and then they will synchronise it.
To create a transcript that is good for subtitling purposes,
remember that one of the main characteristics of a subtitle
is that it is on maximum two liners.
So, create chunks of text distributed on one or two liners.
After that, you press enter twice and create a new chunk of text.
Another important feature is the number of characters per subtitle.
This should be limited to allow the viewer
to easily read the text of the subtitles in a limited time.
This number varies depending on countries and media,
and ranges between 35 to 50 per line.
Another characteristic is that each subtitle should contain an idea unit
and a grammatically finished sentence or clause.
So, edit by means of easy punctuation when possible.
Finally, remember that a subtitle should be readable,
meaning that if a speaker speaks too quickly, you may want to reduce a sentence
or the whole speech to facilitate the viewer’s experience.
Other concepts like synchronization, line breaking, file formatting,
speaker identification, reading speed, minimum gap, minimum and maximum duration,
and several others are too technical to be included in this video lecture.
In this video lecture, we have dealt with post editing,
or correcting our subtitles once the event is over.
In particular, we have seen how to quickly correct a transcript
as an extra service to the client.
Then, we have seen how to create a full transcript
for different professional purposes like the proceedings of a conference,
the report of a parliamentary session or the minutes of an event.
Finally, we have also seen how to make a subtitled video.
Better, we have seen how to produce a text that can be used to subtitle a video.