This report was co-authored by Yulia Akhulkova and Belén Agulló García.
Now is an exciting time for media localization, with technologies improving across the board making automated subtitling and dubbing an actual possibility.
When it comes to subtitling, there are two main ways software can automatically generate subtitles:
You might have seen examples of this technology on YouTube. The platform has an automatic subtitle generation function. The output quality varies depending on the quality of the audio and the pronunciation of the speaker, as well as the language of the video. That is how automatic subtitles are already replacing humans. Although automatic captions including transcription and synchronization are not always available on YouTube currently, YouTube Studio allows you to provide a transcription for your videos. Their solution will automatically synchronize the video with the transcription using the first of the aforementioned methods.
Source: YouTube
There are many software solutions that offer automatic transcription, including Dragon Naturally Speaking, Webcaptioner, and Microsoft Translate. As Mara Campbell from True Subtitles pointed out in her presentation at Media4All, even the cheapest, worst speech recognition software offers greater productivity than doing it manually. We have spotted an increase in services offering automatic transcription and synchronization for subtitles such as Happyscribe, Limecraft, Trint, and Rev.
Machine interpreting (MI) is a hot topic right now as technology providers boast their latest advances in this field. It is likely that the advent of MI will revolutionize the interpreting industry as we know it, similarly to how machine translation (MT) upended the translation industry and ushered in a new era for all stakeholders involved. So, now is the perfect opportunity to take a deep dive into the world of machine interpreting.
19 December 2022