Text expansion and contraction: How to get multilingual subtitling and voice-over right

So, you’ve created your video and you may even have the English voice-over and subtitling ready to go with it.

Later, you take the next step of planning for other languages, so you kick off the translation process and send the script to a translator or an agency. 

Suddenly, you realise the translated script is significantly different in length to your English script. What do you do?

Unfortunately, this is something that can happen often, especially when hiring an unexperienced agency to do it, who haven’t planned for this and haven’t warned you in advance.

Learn how translation affects text length when producing multilingual video content, and what you can do to avoid unnecessary problems.  

The issue 

Essentially, the main issue is that not all languages identical, which means your translations will end up longer or shorter. This is called text expansion and contraction. This is always a huge problem when syncing voice-overs and subtitles to video.

The difference may not seem notable but the table below shows otherwise:

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As you can see, this isjust an example of how different translations can expand, or contract, your script. It shows how challenging producing multilingual video content can be.

If we look at German toEnglish in the table, you will see that it’s not a strict formula that applies to all language - text can either expand or contract depending on the text itself which sometimes happens in the same language! This alone is a nightmarefor the production and marketing teams.

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Why does it happen?

Before we look into the tips and explain what you can do to avoid the problem, perhaps we should address why it occurs in the first place.

Often people believe English is a concise language and therefore expansion occurs because every other language is ‘wordier’. However, this is just a misconception and a key example of this would be ‘Veni, Vidi, Vici’ which into English expands by around 50% and translates into ‘I came, I saw, I conquered’. 

However, other languages have single words that describe short phrases, so this isn't an issue with every translation.  

Bigger challenges are caused by phrases, jargon, or cultural references that are specific to a language, so once translated, they become vastly different and often longer.

When you write in your mother tongue, you take shortcuts without even realising. But these aren't available when translating to different language because they would mean nothingto your foreign audiences.

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The solution 

With voice-overs, you end up asking the voice artist to speed up or slow down and it all sounds a bit messy, and the studio engineer will struggle to make it sound right. With subtitling, you’ll have text covering half the screen or disappearing too quickly. Sometimes you'll have to choose between subtitles and voice-over.

So, keeping all of this in mind, what’s the solution?

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Plan ahead

Just like anything else in business, you need to plan ahead and you need to plan well. If you take your script to a professional agency, they will time the piece, so each language is around the same length for voice-over’s script and subtitles. Without planning, you end up with poor translations and scripts of vastly different lengths.

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Leave extra footage in the timeline

Within your source English video and what we’ll consider the ‘base’ video, try to leave a few gaps to allow for expansion later in the process.

Between sentences, you could leave small pauses of a few seconds extra footage, so there is more room to play with. Depending on the languages you require, a translation could end up 55% longer or 60% shorter which is a stark difference, especially for subtitling projects.

It’s always easier to take away scenes for language that contract, but it’s difficult to produce more for the languages that expand.

For example, a just a three-minute video may end up expanding to over four minutes. This can be a big issue,especially when there isn’t extra footage which can be used to fill in theexpansion.

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Direct the voice artist closely

Sometimes the voiceover artist would read the script at a natural pace and then a studio engineer will try to fit the recording in during post-production. That’s not the most efficient way and may take longer to do. This is called a “wild” recording, and it may sound rushed, or natural when edited too much.

The better option is to do a “strict time constrains” (STC) recording. This way the artist reads the script to the time constraints of the video and at a pave which flows better.The end recording is then a lot easier to incorporate in the video. 

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Our verdict 

Every year, many businesses experience this challenging process and spend a lot of time getting it right. But, you don’t have to be one of them. Now that you’re aware of text expansion and contraction, you can take the necessary steps to make your video project asuccess.

After all, it’s much easier to plan ahead, than learn the hard way - when the translation comes into your office after the video has already been produced!