The statistics speak for themselves: videos have become the preferred communication channel between companies and consumers:
- Each day, 100 million internet users will watch a video online
- By 2019, 80% of internet traffic will be linked to video
- 1/3 of all online activity is dedicated to watching video content.
Of course, unless you are Taylor Swift or Barack Obama, simply posting a video is no automatic guarantee that it will be seen by millions of people, shared on social networks and found, as if by magic, at the top of the search engine results. To ensure effective distribution of your video internationally, you will need multi-lingual subtitles.
Video subtitles: necessary and essential
If we had to give the 3 main reasons why you must use subtitles and translate them, they would be:
Autoplay without sound
Today, on Facebook for example, videos play automatically as soon as they appear. But without sound… and 85% of them are watched without the user manually turning the sound on. Coupled with mobile usage (50% of online videos are watched on a smartphone), this auto-play practice poses certain challenges.
In fact, apps such as YouTube also deactivate the sound by default on mobile devices. If someone watches your video on public transport or another public place, it is unlikely that they will turn on the sound. What’s the consequence of this? Without subtitles, your video will be incomprehensible.
SEO
Search engines cannot decrypt the sound in your videos to understand the content, unless you help them. Thus, subtitling can help the search engine’s algorithms reference and index your video more accurately. This will also lead to better positioning on the search results pages and more organic traffic.
International
There are no borders on the internet: your videos can be seen all over the world, and translated subtitles will facilitate comprehension for as many people as possible. But if you don’t have any subtitles, someone who doesn’t speak the original language of the video will not be able to understand it.
