Video localization/translation: Best practices and tips for the source.

When shooting and editing video that might potentially end up being translated, take into consideration some factors that will end up making the process a lot easier.

1. Popular tools: there are thousands of tools out there for video editing. Use one of the popular, professional ones!
The vendors will have to know the tool and have a copy of it. It will be easier if you can edit your video in one of these, so when you pass the project files, it will be just a matter of click and open.
These are some of the most popular video editors:

• Apple Final Cut Pro
• Adobe Premiere Pro
• Sony Vegas
• Adobe After Effects (Composition software)
• Avid

2. Project files and assets: regardless of the tool used, always keep a copy of the project files and its assets in an organized way.
I.e., if we have on-screen text, keep the layered source files (.PSD, .AI, etc). If your graphics or illustrations are not layered, the vendors will have to re-create them and that will add a lot to the final cost.
Have also the backgrounds, music tracks, fonts, effects, etc, in folders named accordingly.

3. Raw, uncompressed: whether you kept or not your project files, make sure you always keep a raw, uncompressed version of the final, edited video.
The vendors will eventually have to compress the video. If you compress an already compressed copy of it, you will be degrading the quality.

4. Well spoken: When shooting the original, make sure your talent is pausing and being clear.
Whether you are dubbing, replacing the voice tracks, or subtitling, you need to fit the audio or the subtitles in a limited amount of frames, that the audience needs to be able to hear without sounding like “chipmunks”, or read without having to speed thru it.
Remember that there are languages where it will take 1.5 to 2 times to say the same thing as i.e., the English.

5. Dubbing or subtitling? The decision is not just only about the cost. The media on which you are distributing your product will make an impact.
I.e. in a movie that is 720×480 pixels, it will be a lot easier to read subtitles, than in one that is 320×240.

6. Subtitling: before you send out a video for subtitling, there are certain things you have to understand:

• Close Caption: these are the white text under black bars that you usually see in regular TV. This type of subtitles are the most expensive ones and won’t work for media distributed over the internet. It will only work on, surprise, TVs.
• Burned-in subtitles: these are the ones that are always on the video. They can’t be turned off.
• Standalone subtitles: these are, most of the times, text files that are packed along the video, and that need to be turned on by the user. Even if they can be turned on and off, its usability is not the greatest for multimedia projects, because of the different multimedia players in the market.
• DVD subtitles: these can only be created with DVD mastering software. They will only work with DVD movies and can be turned on and off.

7. The storyboard: It will always be easier for the vendors to localize your movie if they have an storyboard of it.
An storyboard, in this case, is an script that also has references to on-screen text, movie cuts and transitions, talent changes, comments, etc.
If that storyboard also points to which assets were used, then a lot better!
I.e. with a storyboard, the vendor can determine how much recording is needed by the female character in the movie, vs. how much is needed for male #1.

8. When screen shots are used: when the video is a tutorial or training, and screenshots of software are used and need to be localized, you will have to provide a list of the software used and the environments created.
If the software has not been released yet, be prepared to provide more than 1 license of that software in the localized language, and 1 license in the source language for reference, and road-maps.
Road-maps are guides, so the vendors can recreate, step by step, what you did in the source video.
If the video is about hardware, then be prepared to supply a prototype, released unit, or emulator so the vendors can take the screenshots.

9. Delivery specs: so what do you want as your end product?
If there are preferences on fonts and colors, pass them up. What type of subtitles you want? What compression you need? Which codec to use? What is the movie size desired? What is the audio compression? What is the file format?

Free SEO: A real example for English and translated web sites.

Search engine optimization can’t be guaranteed, and there are not 100%-proven set paths for succes, so if someone is promising “unreal” results, those promises are for sure just that: unreal. The reason behind its “uncertainty” when it comes to results, is mostly the different algorithms between search engines, the competing sites doing also SEO, so on and so forth.

However, there are techniques that you can put in practice to make things better, and if all the stars align correctly, yes, you can be on the top positions in a couple of popular search engines. For that you can hire an expert, which might cost you a bit, you can get a book, or you can read this article, take some ideas and try to do it yourself.

So let’s get started and let’s use a real example for this exercise. Let’s make sure you are full of patience because you will need a lot of it:

Site: http://www.djjc.com/thecave.php (this is one of the podcasts hosted by DJ JC, where they speak about sex, not as in porn, politics, sports, current events, music, and a lot more. It is in Spanish.)
Current position: as of 03.03.09, the path/site doesn’t show up in the top 48 page results of Google.
Goals: when the word “podcast de sexo” is entered, the site should show up in the top 10/20 positions in Google.

Why would I want to deal with “sexo” as an example? Just because it will give us so many ambiguos results, that is a great example to learn how to also do filtering and remove the “garbage”. At the end, you don’t want just traffic, you want people really interested in listening to a podcast that deals with the mentioned subjects.

03.03.09: KEYWORDS. PROGRESS: NOT IN THE TOP 48 RESULT PAGES.

Here is a list of the current keywords:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”the cave,podcast,numero 1,mejor,latino,
sexo,politica,humor,musica,deportes,relaciones,amor,amistad,consejos,
problemas,latin,spanish,español,espanol,castellano” />

http://googspy.com will help us determine if there are more keyword terms we should take into consideration. I don’t see anything relevant yet. Since you don’t really want to add porn-related terms, here is where your filtering kicks in. Just remember, you don’t want just traffic, you want potential listeners.

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/ will also suggest more keywords. I have replaced “sexo de podcast” by just “sexo“. I have noticed that I should add the words “gratis,oral,relatos” to my keywords, which are relevant to the podcast.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal is Google’s own tool. I will add “rss” to my keywords.

My keywords now are:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”the cave,podcast,numero 1,mejor,latino,
sexo,politica,humor,musica,deportes,relaciones,amor,amistad,consejos,
problemas,latin,spanish,español,espanol,castellano,gratis,oral,relatos,rss” />

NOTE FOR TRANSLATED WEB SITES: sometimes a literal translation of keywords won’t make sense in the market you are targeting. For example, car in Spanish for Latin America would be auto or carro. But in Spain might also be coche. So when deciding your keywords, you will have to also have in mind your target audience.

03.04.09: TITLE. DESCRIPTION. VALIDATION. PROGRESS: NOT IN THE TOP 48 RESULT PAGES.

My title looks like this:

<title>Jose Cotes (DJJC) :: The Cave</title>

The <title> field has become very important when it comes to positioning. Some sites, probably even Google, don’t use anymore the keywords. So let’s add a bit more information here, without making it deceiving.

I will add (Sexo - Humor - Vida) as it is the real name of the podcast. And I will add the word podcast to it.

My new title is:

<title>Jose Cotes (DJJC) :: The Cave (Sexo - Humor - Vida) :: Podcast</title>

My description looks like this:

<meta name=”description” content=”Podcast de sexo, politica, musica, humor, relaciones y mucho mas.” />

It looks ok to me, but I will add the word gratis (free) as I learned that is a popular keyword for people looking for podcasts. Also, I will add the word vida, and change the order of the description, just to make it consistent with the title. My new description will be:

<meta name=”description” content=”Podcast gratis de sexo, humor, vida, politica, musica, relaciones y mucho mas.” />

Since there is not an ultimate meta tag checker, you will have to use a combination of http://www.scrubtheweb.com/abs/meta-check.html and http://www.submitexpress.com/analyzer/.

I have learned that my title is 2 characters too long. There are problems with relevancy of the title, description and keywords, but I will fix those later. There is not a robot meta tag. Let’s add one.

Here is how my <head> section looks like now:

Now let’s go to http://validator.w3.org/. Here I will validate the whole html file and make sure it is fully compliant with standards and browsers. This make take a lot of time if you were not carefull enough creating your pages, but it is totally neccesary. Also, you might have to know a bit about html, xml, css and standards to fix the errors.

03.06.09: CONTENT. SITEMAPS. ROBOTS. PROGRESS: NOT IN THE TOP 48 RESULT PAGES.

Here is what the actual page looks like now:

Besides the archive section having some of the subjects talked about in some of the shows, if you land in that page you don’t have an idea on what “the cave” is about. So, we will have to add an “about” section to the page. That text will also be parsed by the search engines.

Here is the page modified:

Let’s create a sitemap of the entire site (http://www.djjc.com). Why? Because some search engines look for those when checking your site. In a nutshell, the sitemap will tell the search engines what the main page is linking to, change frequency, priorities, etc.

Go to http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ and generate your sitemaps. Save and upload all the files generated (5) in the root of your website.

Now on to Robots: robots.txt will tell the search engines what to list and what not to list. For this site I want all listed but the class and members directory. The class, because it only has code in it. The members because it is a password-protected directory. My robot.txt will look like this:

Save and upload to your root.

03.26.09: SUBMIT. PROGRESS: IN 2ND RESULT PAGE!

Yes you read right! The page is now in the second result page! So, we are all set with Google. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. But let’s make sure we submit this page to the rest of the sites, if we have not already done that.

At http://www.seoconsultants.com/search-engines/ not only we have a list of the Top 10 search engines, but they also have a direct link to the submission sites for each one. So go there and submit to all of of them.