The first step to growing your business and reaching a global audience is to capture the local markets within different regions. According to a survey, locally targeted content results in six times more engagement than content designed for the international market.
Hence, making your content relevant to local audiences may be the secret ingredient to business success.
Localisation is more than just translation. Content localisation is vital if you want your business to stand out in the saturated online marketplace. This post will help you learn the standard meaning of localisation and explore the reasons to localise video content.
What is Video Localization?
Video localisation includes making your content accessible to specific audiences by adapting their local languages. Most people confuse localisation with professional translation solutions. However, although similar in some ways, translation and localisation are slightly different.
An excellent example of localising a video is dubbing it in more than one language to reach wider audiences. Simply put, video localisation aims to reach people from different geographical and linguistic backgrounds. There are several options available to localise online content, especially video, such as:
- Lip syncing
- Dubbing
- Adding subtitles
Reasons to Localise Video Content
With the rising demand for video production in the United Kingdom, some business sites still don’t focus on producing local video content. However, the number of businesses choosing video localisation services has risen over the past few years.
Whether it’s voice-over, dubbing, or just subtitles, video localisation has the power to expand your client base.
Here are five reasons you should localise video content:
- Improves Outreach
The main reason to localise your video content is to go viral. Localisation can reach a broad audience and go viral across borders regardless of the time zone and geographical aspects.
Video localisation allows you to spread your message across the globe.
Babbel Magazine says only 20% of the world’s population have English as their first language. As a result, if you localise video content, you increase the chance to reach and connect to 70% of the world’s population.
- Boosts Interaction
Video is a powerful marketing tool for better customer engagement. You can add localisation to your video content, such as subtitles, dubbed voice-overs, and closed captions. This way, your video will tend to reach the target audience, increasing interactions.
Around 80% of the people in the US agree that they turn off the sound of a video and prefer using subtitles.
- Cultural Relevance
Audiences engage more when online content is relevant to them. Video localisation can be a great tool in catering to your customer’s needs. 75% of online users prefer to purchase if the product information is available in their native language.
For example, if you localise your multimedia content into the French language, people speaking French from all around the world will relate to your content.
- Better SEO
It is not a surprise that video is an important ranking factor of SEO. Hence, search engines like Google and Bing highly favour localised videos. These websites with localised videos are most likely to rank higher on the SERPs.
- Contributes to Better UX
According to a survey, most users like to watch videos with the sound turned off. So, localised videos are proven significant in increasing consumer watch time. In addition, it leads to more engagement and a satisfying user experience.
Standard Ways to Localise Your Video Content
If you want to localise your video, the first step is to understand the concept of localisation. The primary thing about localisation is that it doesn’t change the visual aspect of the video. It’s only the audio that gets localised.
Below are two standard options to make your video content localised:
- Subtitles
If you have a small business or perhaps a tight budget, subtitles are the best way to localise your videos. It is one of the most effective tools to reach new and diverse audiences. No matter which language your content is uploaded, it can be transcribed quickly into readable subtitles.
There are two methods of adding subtitles to your video:
- Translated Subtitles. These are subtitles where the original script of the video is translated and compressed if needed. The translated subtitles are those present at the bottom of your online video. These subtitles are shortened and time coded. As a result, every subtitle aligns with what is playing on the screen. These subtitles cannot be turned off.
- Closed Captions. Unlike translated subtitles, closed captions can be turned on and off according to the viewer’s choice. Closed captions also include non-speech elements, such as music, sound, movement, etc.
- Voice-Over Audio Recording
The translated script of the video is recorded using a voice-over artist. If your video has an English original script, the voice-over artist must have a native voice.
Furthermore, there are also options for voice-over audio recording depending on your work nature and budget, including;
- Dubbing is an affordable, standard, and simple localisation technique. In dubbing, the original audio is replaced with the speaker’s voice in a specific language. For example, if your original video is in the English language, to make it relevant to German people, you will have to dub the video in the German language. It is not necessary to match the movement of the speaker’s lip with the dubber’s voice.
- Lip Syncing. Lip syncing is another localisation technique. The voice-over artist lip-syncs the original speaker’s movement in the video. However, it is a complex and more expensive process. The cost of hiring a voice-over artist and making sure the voice perfectly matches the speaker’s lip movement can be time-consuming and more costly.
If you are still on the fence about whether to localise your video or not, ask yourself this: Do you want to attract a foreign audience? If the answer is yes, then localisation is ideal for you.
Luckily, there are a variety of options for localisation to choose from. When localising your video content, make sure to keep the following things in mind;
- Cultural sensitivity
- Budget
- Target audience
- Topic relevance
- Your objective
Video localisation can help you reach a global audience. We hope the things explained here will help you generate quality and relevant video localised content.
