TechSmith Camtasia Studio: Localizing Closed Captions

by Kevin Siegel   

 

Last week I wrote about the process of adding closed captions to Camtasia projects that help make your project accessible to learners with disabilities.

During a recent Camtasia class, a student asked about providing the captions in other languages than English (she was asked to create versions of her project in a dozen languages).

Localization of an eLearning project can present a tough challenge to any developer. Fortunately, it's fairly easy to convert Camtasia captions to different languages. Here's how.

In the image below, notice that I've already added the closed captions to my project.

 

After adding the captions, I ensured the captions and the voiceover audio were synced via the Timeline.

 

At the bottom of the Callouts panel, I clicked Export captions.

 

I gave my caption file a name and, from the Save as type drop-down menu, I selected SRT. (There are two choices: SRT and SMI. They are basically the same type of Caption File except SRT files do not retain font formatting; SMI files do.)

 

In the image below, I've opened the SRT file in Notepad. Then I replaced the English text with Chinese. (I used Google Translate for this test so if you speak Chinese, please forgive any errors.) When replacing the text, I was careful not to mess around with the numbers above each caption.

 

Back in Camtasia, all that was left to do was to click Import captions and open the SRT file I had translated.

 

 

And in an instant, all of the captions were translated to Chinese.

 

Perhaps more important, the synching work I had done on the Timeline was retained.

 

If you'd like to watch a video that demonstrates the process of localizing Camtasia callouts and importing/exporting, here you go.

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Comments

[Richard Napier]

The likelihood is however that the closed captions, when translated, no longer fit as easily as they did in the primary language if it was English. for example, translating to German will produce longer, compound words and therefore there will be significant rework needed moving the synch points, cutting and pasting text into different chunks otherwise some text will simply overflow and not appear as the caption area is limited in the amount of text you can display (possibly 4 lines if I remember).