| Matthew |
Hello, I’m Matthew Cottingham, program director at RWS Moravia. I’m here with David Hansfield of DotSub. DotSub is a company that localizes media content with professional captioning and translations. They also use the latest tech to automate speech recognition and voice over solutions. In my chat today with David were talking about how why to localize video, how subtitling efforts can be successful and a lot about the concept of how to make your videos accessible, both in the ADA sense but also in the global consumption sense. Let’s get started. |
| Matthew |
David, welcome. Thank you for joining us today on Globally Speaking. |
| David |
Thank you for having me Matthew, it’s great to be here. |
| Matthew |
Of course. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself to get started? |
| David |
Sure. My name is David Hansfield, I’m the EVP of Global Sales for Dotsub. I’ve been in the translation business for about five years. Before that I was in captioning and then advertising and media promotions. |
| Matthew |
You’ve been around the subbing and dubbing and captioning business for- |
| David |
Yes. |
| Matthew |
… for quite a while. Has it been 20 years now you’ve been in the business? |
| David |
I’ve been in the business over 20 years, in some sort of video production capacity. |
| Matthew |
So maybe for our listeners who are disfamiliar with the subbing and captioning world, you could tell us a little bit about what it is your company does in the subbing space. |
| David |
Sure. Yeah, I mean really simply put, Dotsub is a translation company that specializes in video. So we offer customers a variety of different ways to work with us. They can either use our technology, they can use our professional and language services, they can use a hybrid of both. So we have a platform where people can caption and translate their video with their own language teams. They can have project managers and editors and administrators and so forth. And it’s a really end-to-end system for them to use with their team. |
| Matthew |
Why should our listeners be interested in captioning and in subtitling? Why is it important for them to think about it when they may not have much experience in it today? |
| David |
Yeah. I mean that’s a great question Matthew. I think it’s all about accessibility. You know, captioning and subtitling may not sound exciting but when you open the door to offer your video content to audiences that may not be able to understand it or may not want to watch it because it’s not in their native language or they’re hearing impaired, then that’s really exciting. That gives you a whole new audience. Increases your ROI, increases your audience and as a concept maker, right, you want the biggest audience you can get.
So if you look at it from an accessibility stand point, I think it becomes really exciting. So just captioning in the source language has become something that is so much more popular in the past several years with being a sound down, sound off society. When I first started selling captioning, I was heavy on the deaf and hard of hearing community, which is still really near and dear to me. But it’s not the only reason now for people to caption in the source language.
It’s now because people won’t watch your video if they’re scrolling through their social media feed and you don’t have the captions burned in. They’ll probably scroll past. In the old days, like pre-COVID, they’re in the subway or they’re at work or somewhere other than home and they’re not able to use the sound or they just don’t want to bother. So- |
| Matthew |
Yeah, my daughters, who are both in their 20s, insist on having the subtitles on at all times.
It’s just a habit of that, of at least them and their friends.
They like to have it on and it’s not for accessibility reasons, usually it’s because they’re scrolling through their phone and look up and can catch a few lines and can then look back down at their phones again. |
| David |
Right. Well I mean that’s accessibility too. It’s just a different type of accessibility. Right? |
| Matthew |
Sure, sure. |
| David |
So… and then translating into different languages. Global is so easy now, right? We’re so easily connected to each other through the internet that why not translate it so that people can understand what’s going on? I mean some of this video is so important that it should be translated, that people should knock down that barrier of language and be able to understand the content in their native language. And that’s the basis of what Dotsub is built upon. And that’s what we strive for. And I think it’s really important. Not every video’s a cat video. |
| Matthew |
Yeah. |
| David |
And so get information. That’s what I tell people. Not everybody has a cat video and there’s some really good information and really people should have access to that no matter what.
I don’t even know if cat videos are still popular anymore. |
| Matthew |
Oh I’m sure they are. I’m sure they’re like clogging up the networks even as we speak, yes. Talk to me a little bit about trends. What have you seen changed either in the accessibility space or overall in the business? |
| David |
Yeah, I think the barrier for entry has gone down. When I first started captioning, I think we charged like two or three hundred dollars for the first 10 minutes of content. It was ridiculous. |
| Matthew |
Wow. |
| David |
And so that was broadcast quality captions but the world was starting to stream and put video on social media and that wasn’t a model that was going to last long in that environment. So the barrier entry for captioning and for subtitling in foreign languages has changed, it’s a lot less expensive. And there’s just more content. I mean that’s the biggest trend is that especially with COVID kind of accelerating our use of video, there’s just more content out there. And more content owners are realizing how easy it is to put subtitles and captions to their video, whether they do it themselves, whether it’s automated or whether they hire a professional service, it’s not difficult. It’s not hard to go find somebody and get that done. So I think that’s the first thing.
The second thing is, technology is definitely going to play a role. Machine translation is going to become more prominent as that gets better and automated speech recognition is going to be more prominent. And so maybe not for a final product that you see but certainly as a tool for humans to create, you know, a faster step in the workflow. So they get the work quicker and they edit rather than start from scratch. |
| Matthew |
Talk to me a little bit more about the machine translation piece of this.
How does that fit together with your business? |
| David |
So it really is depending on what the clients’ needs are. And we don’t just like to throw technology at the wall just because it’s a good technology. Oh, here’s a machine translation, take it. You know, machine translation on its own is probably not what a client needs but as part of a workflow, it’s… might be a really good idea. And so you know, we’re seeing first off with MT, the first thing that people I don’t think realize when they’re captioning or subtitling is that you really need a good source language file, that first caption file and the source language to be accurate and correct. Not only for the translation meaning but for the timing.
And so kind of a difference between text and video is that in text you have a long runway and punctuation and everything else all laid out for and you kind of, you can go from there. In video you’re limited, right? You’re limited to the time that the person is speaking in order to fit your captions and subtitles in that box. |
| Matthew |
So part of my experience working with subtitles is that when you’re doing quality control on them, people kind of like to see how it looks, how the events look in the video itself. It’s hard to do it just from the text. You have to sort of see it in context and so do you find yourself going back again and again with creative teams or production teams? Is there a cycle that happens with we’ve got them together, now we’ve done some quality control. Now they don’t quite look right, the director or the creative leads that that’s not what I actually meant in Spanish or Italian or French. How much of your work is that sort of iterative, get it better to a certain level before it gets released sort of? |
| David |
Right. My favorite is, “A person in the office speaks this language and they’ve looked at it and they would never say it that way.” So, that’s always my favorite. We can work whatever way the client wants. And so we offer a review step in our workflow for the client. So after we do our work, if we’re doing the language services, they have a chance to go in and create edits within that file.
And so that sometimes takes that out of play, where the client has creative differences with our translators.
Sometimes it’s a drag out fight between three translators. Our translator, the editor and the translator for the client and- |
| Matthew |
Sure, sure. |
| David |
… it could get hairy sometimes but not too much. |
| Matthew |
That’s kind of goes with the translation and localization business. |
| David |
Yes. They have to realize timing as well. In certain languages you can say things a certain way in a certain amount of time. But other languages, it’s just too long. |
| Matthew |
Yeah, you get into German or something that’s an expansive language, getting a certain number of events per screen could be challenging. And you have to sort of change your approach to get them on screen fast enough for people to be able to read them but still retain the information. |
| David |
Yup. And then there are rules too, the regulations especially in the US with ADA regulations for English and then into Spanish. And so you might want to say something a certain way in Spanish but now all your regulations… it ruins the whole timing and all the characters per line and everything you set as your standard is out the window and then it’s not correct. So… |
| Matthew |
Yup. You’re talking about ADA again and you told me a story when we spoke last about how you got into the accessibility business. |
| David |
Yeah. So my grandparents were deaf. And when I was little, I remember them getting the closed captioning box. It was a set upon their TV. And I am pretty sure I remember the installation. I remember when they got it and my uncle installed it and it was like a light turned on. When they watched TV, they could actually see the words. They watched the news, I think it was just the news at that time. And my grandfather was a big Cubs fan and eventually he could watch the Cubs games with the captions on. And that was like such a magical experience that he could hear the broadcaster and understand what was going on. I mean he was an avid baseball fan. He understood anyways but still just that extra step of seeing the words the broadcaster was saying was extremely impactful. It’s something has stayed with me. |
| Matthew |
Yeah and you probably get a little charge every time you release something thinking that somebody might be getting the same opportunity- |
| David |
I do. |
| Matthew |
… some place in the world that maybe they didn’t get before. Yeah, it’s really-what an exciting thing each time. I get a little chill when you hear, when I hear you tell- |
| David |
Yeah- |
| Matthew |
… that story, right? |
| David |
I just got a chill too. Yeah. Exactly. I really do and it’s really important for people to have access to content. |
| Matthew |
What are some challenges that you have when work’s coming your way or in order to make sure that the quality gets out on time and on budget and whatnot? |
| David |
Sure, I think our biggest issue is the misconception that this can be done so easily by machine. And so the first question I- it’s always asked to me is, “So, this is all done by machine, right?”
I go, “No, actually humans do it.” We can incorporate the machines but actually human beings are working on this. And so, if they see it like a 20 minute piece of content and they’ll go, “Well, we should have this back by tomorrow. We just want it translated in Spanish and captioned in English.” It’s a bit of a learning curve for the client to understand how that Spanish translator can really only do 15 or 20 minutes a day. But for the whole day of that content to do a really good job. |
| Matthew |
Yup. And then it’s often a conversation of value at that point. Do we really need seven days to do this, can you do it in six? Can you do it in five? Can we do it at a lower quality? |
| David |
It’s almost like name that tune. Right? |
| Matthew |
Yes, yes. And the thought that typically comes up is, Yes, we maybe could, if you want really messy translations. Because at the end nobody wants to see the captions messed up, right? They don’t want to- |
| David |
Right. |
| Matthew |
… right? Then it becomes really important that you go back and spend some time on it. |
| David |
Yeah. Yeah, so that’s I think the biggest misconception is how fast we can churn these out and maintain a really good quality. So- |
| Matthew |
You talked a little bit about mindset, about how easy or how challenging it might be when you talk to customers. When you’re approaching that mindset, how do you ease into the conversation or get them thinking about the challenges? |
| David |
That’s a good question. It’s really digging for their pain. Understanding what their needs are. And their needs are never the original reason why they called me. So if somebody says, “Oh, I need this done by tomorrow” and especially if it’s a new customer, it’s like, Well what… tell me more. “Oh our attorneys at the office need regulations.” or “we got dinged last time and we got fined, so we need to have all these captioned now.”
And so there’s a deeper reason why people are doing things. Even the simplest of tasks. And so trying to uncover that is my first goal with all the customers, whether they’re new or returning. And once I do that, then it’s easier for me to have that conversation of, “Well, we can knock these out with a machine and you can get them back in 10 minutes but I don’t think that’s going to solve your problem-
It’s not going to be perfect. You still might get dinged by the regulators.” “You might send them up to legal and they still might be rejected. So let’s talk about our process and our workflow and how that, you know, fits into what you want to do and create a really realistic timeline of what we can do and how we can do it.” |
| Matthew |
Yeah. So you don’t end up redoing it later as well. It’s actually going to save you some time. I think that some customers have blind spots there and just sort of want it done. And I think, you know, you talked a little bit about ADA and accessibility. Are there other trends that are driving uptake of video? So you talked a little bit about just the sort of, I’ll call it a tipping point of volume and then accessibility is another piece. Are there other pieces to this that are driving change? And are there and if the answer is yes and I kind of think it is- |
| David |
It is. |
| Matthew |
… then where do you see us going next? What’s the future look like? |
| David |
Well I think COVID, like I said before, I think COVID has been the big accelerator. So now that professional associations know that they can have a conference online, I think that’s a big switch in their mindset. So I do think we’ll go back to having conferences. I sure hope so because I miss seeing people and interacting with people. But I think now that cat is out of the bag, that they can have at least some of the sessions online or maybe a combination of things. I think we’ll see more and more of that through video. And that’s become one of the biggest parts of our business is captioning those sessions and translating them for the global audience of the conference.
Some of the sessions are pre-recorded, some of them are in real-time. Some of them are live. We work mostly on the offline and we see a lot of the conferences who are pre-recording their keynotes and round tables ahead of time. So we work on those at a really tight timeline because they usually come to us late. |
| Matthew |
Of course they do. Yes. A week before, “Oh by the way, we have a conference, can you get-” |
| David |
Right and this is supposed to come to you three weeks ago but now it’s coming to you a week before the conference and we need it in all these languages. Yeah. |
| Matthew |
And we just happen to have a whole bunch of people on our linguist bench ready to hop into the game.
No, then it’s time to get on the phone, right? |
| David |
Yup. So that’s been a definite shift. And with that too we work with a lot of major corporations, enterprise level corporations who are now, you know, putting their CEO messages out in several languages, where they might not have before. Or they… we’re working with organizations who are putting information out about COVID and about how to protect yourself. And they’re thinking, well of course it needs to be captioned. And then we should put it in… and if it’s US based, we should put it in Spanish. So yeah. I think the trend is people kind of re-thinking how they can create accessible content and you know, what their, who their audience is and how they want to reach them and that’s usually through captions and foreign language subtitles. |
| Matthew |
Are there other fundamental things that need to change in order to continue to accelerate the business? I mean, is it technology? |
| David |
I think it’s first of all, it’s not just for the deaf and hard of hearing.
And it’s not just for cool films that you see in small cinemas, you know, that have four language subtitles on the bottom. So that’s the first misconception. But that is melting away. And both those points by the way are really important. Again, deaf and hard of hearing community absolutely should have access to this video content through accessible captions. Closed captioning. And if I go see a movie and it’s in a different language, I’ll definitely want to see the subtitles.
But now it’s such a broader range. Right? We’re doing such a broader range of content, whether it’s corporate, whether it’s entertainment, streaming, we’re, we work with Amazon, we’re an Amazon preferred vendor for Prime and the amount of documentaries people are making and short films people are making has just increased exponentially and content is just coming through the door that we’re working on. |
| Matthew |
Yeah. I wonder if it’s the trend of videos are easier to make now, right? There’s iPhone movie makers and I saw one that was filmed in Super Eight not long ago right? They’re just cheap technology or say access to easier tools. And you know, people can go learn pro tools or they can go learn mixing, you know, themselves. |
| David |
So many editing, you know, cloud based editing software. It’s so easy to do now that yeah, you’re right, that barrier to produce content has gone down dramatically. |
| Matthew |
Let’s talk a little bit about future trends. Where else do you see us going in the future? |
| David |
We’re getting a lot of requests for dubbing. |
| Matthew |
Interesting. |
| David |
And for voice. So that’s typically really expensive and only reserved for high end entertainment content. But as automated voices become better and people become more accepting of that, I think you’ll see more voice over come into play. So automated voice over |
| Matthew |
I don’t know why this popped into my mind but I think about deepfakes in dubbing. |
| David |
Right. |
| Matthew |
Right? And I wonder if that ever occurs to you or crosses over into your world? |
| David |
Yeah, I was at GALA a couple of years ago, I think there was a round table about that. And I left there thinking, Wow, that’s certainly going to change things. |
| Matthew |
It’s a little frightening and a little bit compelling at the same time. I don’t know if that’s the definition of a car wreck or if it’s just the future that we need to embrace somehow. I’m fascinated by it. So you said you went to a conference and you sat through a seminar with it.
Do you have, I’m just going to call it, fake people dubbing that you do today? Or get asked to do today? |
| David |
No; in fact, we don’t do as much dubbing as I would like. But it’s becoming a trend. People are definitely asking for it.
We’re getting a lot of folks ask us about voice over in education. And they certainly don’t have a budget to hire a professional voice over artist to go back and read the translations. |
| Matthew |
Why do you think they’re asking? Why do you think specifically in education that they’re asking for dubbing? I’m just curious. |
| David |
I think maybe they are worried that students won’t follow along with the captions or subtitles.
When I think studies have shown that people actually learn better if the subtitles are there. So if English is my second language and I see the subtitles in Spanish, I’m actually learning better hearing the English and then watching the subtitles in Spanish. |
| Matthew |
Sure, interesting. Sure. Sure. Because you get it on two levels then. Right? |
| David |
Right. |
| Matthew |
So, how do we want business leaders to think differently? |
| David |
Yeah and I think actually that’s a trend that’s happening now where our services are incorporated into the work flow of the content from the beginning instead of as an afterthought.
So that’s becoming a trend where we’re just… we’re there and companies are calling us now and wanting to set up accounts with us because they’re adding it to their workflow. And so if I were to get in the room with them, I’d want to know who their audience is first of all.
And understand who they’re marketing to. And that at least sets the groundwork for translations. And then I’m always an advocate for captions. For especially the source language captioning. Because I always think you need that accessibility for the product and then you want it. Not just for the deaf and hard of hearing, but you want it for your 20 year old daughters who are only watching videos with… on Facebook with the subtitles burnt in. |
| Matthew |
Yes, indeed. |
| David |
And they’re skipping. You know, why have anybody skip your video because they don’t want to turn on their sound? They’re not- |
| Matthew |
Sure, sure. It’s becoming a competitive differentiator. |
| David |
Right. |
| Matthew |
And as soon as you start talking that way with executives, right, that you’re competing with others for eyeballs or attention and this is one way to capture and hang onto people, I think it becomes a more compelling argument than a nice to have, which is the way it was in the past. |
| David |
Yes. Exactly. And then what do you see? |
| Matthew |
What do I see? |
| David |
Yeah. |
| Matthew |
I see more requests for technology these days. I see we get to an inevitable moment where you have to hand files back and forth between systems.
You have to have translation management systems or content management systems and I think that it’s easy to overlook those things in the rush to get things done, right? As a company we tend to come in with our hand open and say, “What do you need? Let’s consult first, let’s understand what you want.” And then the technology becomes a later conversation. And I think that having the technology, the underlying infrastructure, the tools and conversation needs to happen earlier as well. |
| David |
Right. |
| Matthew |
Because you can spend a lot of cycles saying what… Now what file format are we supposed to be handing back and forth and… |
| David |
And how do we get it to you? How do you get it back to us? |
| Matthew |
Yes. Do you want to use Dropbox? Or do you want- |
| David |
Right. |
| Matthew |
…a full fledged connector into your content management system? Do you want to, you know, do you want to work with an API or web service, something, you know, slick and enterprise ready. And… What I find is that there’s a gradient between how much technology and how enterprise advanced and speed. You have to optimize for those things. So I that, maybe it’s because I come from a technology background that I tend to urge those conversations earlier. Right? From an IT and operations perspective. I think it’s possible to declare success and then not have any metrics about uptake or usage.
I think that we can get better as an industry in terms of how we track and improve over time what we’re doing purely in terms of subbing, dubbing, captioning. |
| David |
Tracking would be huge. Knowing when somebody turns on the subtitles and what language they’re watching it in is big for us. Now, we are more enterprise you know, large corporation, so I’m not privy to that information, as much as I’d like to be. |
| Matthew |
Sure. Sure. |
| David |
But that’s huge for people to understand their ROI and then incorporate these languages earlier in the process. |
| Matthew |
When you go in and you’re figuring the technology piece of this, in terms of ROI, how much do you engage with that early? At what point do you start talking about technology and maybe what could be an offering for the customer? |
| David |
Yeah, well now, first, do they want to use our API? Are they going to be a customer that’s going to be doing this on a daily, monthly, weekly basis, that they’re going to be sending files back and forth or is it just going to be one or two files a week and they’re going to upload it on their own because it takes just a few minutes?
Are they using an OVP, like WiCom or Kaltura, or something like that where they want to transfer files that way?
How are they getting the files to us and how are they, how are we getting the files back to them?
Then after that, that’s a really important conversation because I’ve had people early on, when they’ve had several hundred videos and they have no way to get them to us. And they don’t want to sit there and upload each one to our platform manually. |
| Matthew |
Yeah, I guess the pain that I have felt also in the past is the departments you work with aren’t necessarily as technology savvy as ours. You’re not necessarily working with dev platforms or dev ops or somebody like that. It’s a marketing department or it’s somebody in training services, something like that. Well they may need to try to pull on internal resources that maybe it isn’t a priority for them. Then we spend time trying to be that devops team on side of the fence, trying to guess what’s on the other side of the fence. |
| David |
Right. And that’s really interesting because it’s nice to work with a variety of people. One of my clients is a doctor of anesthesiology, in a university in Northern California. I mean he has no experience in video, no experience in translation, but they made a video series on how to fight COVID.
So they wanted to have it translated. They’d no idea how to get us the files or even what they were asking for. And they just wanted the captions to appear, they didn’t have any idea how that was going to happen. |
| Matthew |
On that note, when you get somebody who’s not necessarily you know, technically deep in this field, maybe technically deep in other fields, how do you convince them or show them at the end that you’ve done a great job? How do you make them say, “Wow”? |
| David |
Right, I think it’s just the work. I mean, I think it’s the first giving them a general understanding of what we do and how we do it. Understanding the workflow and then understanding the final deliverable. This is a file, you connect it to your video. And once they do that and they see it, it’s like a light turns on and then if they can get some compliments, like thank you… we’ll usually get people to say that someone in their audience had written them in saying thank you for providing these captions, thank you for providing these translations, it was really beneficial for me. And that’s just like really gratifying. |
| Matthew |
I love that. You’ve inspired me to go do some more work today. |
| David |
Go do more work. |
| Matthew |
David, thank you so much for coming and spending some time with us today. It was fun. Good luck and I assume that we’ll see more of your subtitles in the world soon. |
| David |
I hope so. Thank you, Matthew, I had a blast. |
| Matthew |
It was fun. Yeah, thank you. |
