Occasionally, you may decide to watch a movie with subtitles. Upon viewing the subtitles, you may notice something bizarre about them. Perhaps the captioned words do not match what people say in the movie. After all, some words do sound alike. Another problem you may encounter is a film with delayed captions. It is misleading since you may think the captions belong to the words currently being spoken when not the case.
To prevent such captioning mishaps, you will need to choose a captioning service carefully. However, before choosing one, you need to be wary of crucial factors to consider. Here are five factors to consider when selecting a captioning service.
Turnaround Time
Choosing a company that can complete a task within a particular deadline is essential. It is vital when you are working for a news broadcasting firm. Can you imagine the awkwardness you will feel when the company is late? In addition, it will interfere with the dissemination of news to the public.
Most companies will indicate their turnaround time on their website, for instance, six hours. If you find six hours too long for your needs, you could choose one with a less turnaround time.
Accuracy
You may be lucky to find a company that meets your deadlines. However, it would be pointless if their resulting work was inaccurate. Handling inaccurate captions is time-consuming since you will have to correct all the errors made. Before choosing a captioning company, please find out how they minimize inaccuracies.
An excellent online captioning company proofreads its work as many times as possible. Some companies rely solely on the captioner to proofread their work. However, it is not advisable since the captioner may not discover an error they made. Instead, a third party should proofread their work again since they will likely spot errors the captioner did not know about.
Price
Before settling on a price, you should first consider your company’s budget. Hiring captioning services can be rather costly. The last thing you would want is for your company to go bankrupt.
There are two main ways captioning services set their price. Some companies put a standard rate for a video file regardless of their length, while others charge per minute. If you intend to caption a five-minute clip, being charged per minute makes more sense. However, being charged per minute for a sixty-minute clip will be costly. Going for a standard rate will therefore make sense for the clip.
Language Fluency
Some people watch videos that are dubbed in another language. Others, however, hate the dubbing format and prefer to read the subtitles instead. To cater to the latter audience, you need to ensure a captioning company has diverse speakers of many languages.
To determine their fluency in another language, ask for their language proficiency certificates. By being proficient, they will translate what is said in the video to another language with high degrees of accuracy.
Customer Service
Crucial things to consider are their availability and their problem-solving abilities. For availability, ensure the company is available 24/7 to answer your queries. An online company that works round the clock understands that clients operate in different time zones. Also, they know that captioning mishaps can occur at any time.
A good company should solve your problems as first as possible. It can be frustrating for a client to be put on hold while the agent endlessly consults with their colleagues. As a result, your phone bill becomes expensive. If the customer service team has to keep consulting, you may need to look elsewhere.
Conclusion
Hopefully, the tips above will ease your search for a captioning services company online. You can only know a good company from experience. The best way would be reading online reviews or talking to a friend who has hired a certain captioning company online.
Through the reviews, you will weigh out the pros and cons. You can also use the mentioned tips as a checklist from the reviews. For instance, would you rather hire a company whose customer service is poor but meet your deadlines? You will decide whether such a company is convenient for you or not.
