Dear Slow Clap: To Caption or To Subtitle Your Video?
Dear Slow Clap,
We recently completed a video marketing project, and we’ve been informed that it needs captions to meet accessibility requirements. Are captions the same as subtitles, or is there a difference between the two?
– Puzzled Project Manager
Dear Puzzled Project Manager,
Thanks for your question! We definitely understand the mix-up between these two terms. While both captions and subtitles refer to text that appears on screen in sync with the audio in your video, they each serve fundamentally different purposes.
First, let’s take a look at subtitles. Subtitles are essentially a transcript of the dialogue in your video that is intended to aid viewers who can hear but not understand the language being used in your video. So, if your video is originally in English, but you want to reach Spanish-speaking audiences, you would request Spanish subtitles from a transcription service provider.
Now let’s look at captions. Captions are also a transcript of the dialogue in your video, but as opposed to subtitles, these match the language being spoken in the video and are used to aid viewers who have difficulty hearing or cannot hear audio. Captions tend to be more descriptive than subtitles, as they can indicate who in your video is speaking or what sound effects (SFX) are being heard. If you’re being asked to make your video comply with accessibility, then you will need to request captions from a transcription service provider.
To take it one step further, captions are divided into “open” and “closed” captions. Don’t worry, the difference is quite small (but important!).
“Open” captions are baked-in to your video - in other words, they cannot be freely enabled or disabled by the viewer at will and are permanently fixed into the video. On the other hand, “closed” captions are not baked-in and can be freely enabled or disabled by the viewer at any time. You may already be familiar with closed captioning as it has become an increasingly popular and automated feature across all sorts of entertainment media these days, like smart TV's and streaming platforms.
If you’re thinking: are there also “closed” and “open” subtitles? The short answer is no. However, subtitles can be, in most cases, freely enabled and disabled by the viewer. So you can think of subtitles as a type of open captioning that is exclusively for content of a different language than the primary content.
While nowadays you can rely on any number of AI transcription services to provide you with captions or subtitles, we would still highly recommend having actual people (like us here at Slow Clap) assist with transcription work. This is especially true with any kind of translation work that might require you to preserve the nuances of the original language being translated.
You may be wondering: but what if my video is only partly in a language that needs subtitles, and the rest only needs captions? This is very common and not something to worry about! Your trusted transcription provider should allow you to choose the sections of your video that need subtitles versus captions specifically.
Hope this has been a helpful guide for you!
Alexander at Slow Clap
Further readings
- Closed Captions vs. Subtitles: The Difference | Rev
- Open Captions vs. Closed Captions: What's the Difference?
- Subtitles, Closed Captions, and Open Captions: What's the Difference? | Ben Myers
- Closed Captions (CC) vs Subtitles | Subly Blog
Other Dear Slow Clap blogs
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