Six Languages, 24 Hours, 99% Accuracy

Services: Subtitling, translation

The challenge:

A major government defense contractor regularly hosts webinars for its global workforce, which spans more than a dozen countries and includes speakers of six languages in addition to English.

The content of these sessions is highly time-sensitive, requiring subtitles to be delivered within 24 hours—otherwise, they lose their relevance.

To meet this demand and ensure accessibility for all employees, the company partnered with Cinepros.

Our solutions:

11:00 am - Webinar concludes and recording is made available to Cinepros.

3:00 pm - Raw transcript is complete. Fat has been trimmed from the dialogue, fillers, false starts, and aborted sentences were omitted. Meanwhile, [inaudibles] and clarifications are requested from the client.

9:00 pm - English SRT creation is complete. During timecoding, dialogue is refined, simplified, and occasionally reworded, to convey the message as clearly and concisely as possible. Extraneous and repetitive phrasing is removed, ensuring the English subtitles are optimized for machine translation.

9:30 pm - English SRT is run through machine translation in each of the six languages. 

10:00 pm - Each SRT file is then handed off to language-specific editors for quality control.

Rather than aiming for “cinema-quality” subtitles, the focus is on clarity and readability so the message is easily understood. Any machine translation errors are corrected, and awkward phrasing is refined for accuracy and fluency.

9:00 am (the following day) - Fully QC’ed subtitles are delivered to the client.