Subtitles

Screencasts are often used as instructional videos to show people how to achieve specific tasks. Most screencasts include a visual part that is the main focus and often have an audio commentary describe what is taking place or add extra information. Subtitles add a third method of description, but one that can be easily translated into other languages or quickly searched for particular section information. They also sometimes help to clarify parts of the screencast that might not come through in the graphical or audio descriptions.

The main focus on subtitles for this team is to turn the audio track in to text, then translate this text into other languages. In order to help the translation effort it is important that the focus is on clear and easy to understand sentences, rather than an exact word for word transcription. This obviously means some information will be lost at the expense of clarity. Though you should aim to keep to the audio track as close as possible. Please try to follow the documentation team's recommendations

Typically you will be creating subtitles from scratch using the already completed screencast that has been uploaded to the screencasts website. If you are the creator of a screencast and have kept notes, then they can be imported into an editor to speed up the process.

Subtitle editing applications

There are several subtitle editors available on Linux, the feature sets are quite similar and some focus on translation of existing subtitles rather creation of new ones.

• Subtitle Editor

• Gaupol

• Gnome Subtitles

• Aegisub

• Comparison of Features - A comparison of the features of the major subtitle editing applications.

Subtitle format

There are many subtitle formats available and each of them have different features, but not all of them are supported by all media players. Currently, the format of choice is Subrip with UTF-8 encoding. Although Subrip does not support advanced features such as text styles or placement, it has the best compatibility with media players on all platforms. I see no advantage to using another format such as Advanced Sub Station, unless there is demand.

Method of Translation

• Translation

• TranslationStatus

Distribution

• Distribution