Subtitling and Voice-Over Services

In a globalizing world companies must continuously strive to offer multimedia content in various languages. This goes beyond brochures, manuals, and even websites, to include marketing videos, training or instructional videos, and similar content that a company may produce for its employees or customers. One specialty service that PLG offers, beyond regular translation, is subtitling and voice-over of video and audio files.

While many people may initially think of Hollywood or the entertainment industry when they think of subtitling or voice-over, our focus is on helping companies communicate with their customers in all mediums and media platforms. 

Having a video subtitled or dubbed with a new language can certainly be a more expensive service than translation of a document, but it can also be an extremely effective way to bring new and important material to your multilingual staff and clients. It also displays another layer of effort and inclusivity to all those who may take interest in your product or services. 

A number of PLG’s customers have taken advantage of our multimedia services, and reached out to their audiences with translated video and audio clips.  We recently assisted a major U.S. based financial organization in adding multilingual subtitles to over two dozen of their corporate education and promotional videos. They have been doing this for a several years, and have found it a very effective means to achieve their business objectives. Another project we worked on was for a technical firm that opted to create multilingual product training videos to improve their training results.   If you would like to take a look at samples of our work in this field please visit http://plg-online.com/multimedia_localization.html and click the “Samples” tab.

If presenting your company in a global light and offering multimedia content in multiple languages is important to you we would be happy to chat further about how we can help! 

Give us a call at 1(847) 413-1688, or email us at info@plg-online.com today!

“Traditional or Simplified Chinese?”

Do I need Traditional Chinese or Simplified Chinese for this product brochure translation?  May I have my business card typeset in Cantonese or Mandarin? What dialect of Chinese is used Taiwan? We constantly receive questions like these from our customers regarding the most widely spoken language in the world.

Well, first of all, let’s clarify a couple of concepts. When we talk about Simplified Chinese vs. Traditional we are talking about two distinct sets of Chinese characters with some overlap; we are not talking about spoken language.  Simplified Chinese was a written form developed in the 1950s as the result of an effort by the Chinese government in Mainland China to promote literacy. This new written form took the characters used in Traditional Chinese, which have not changed since about the 5^th Century, and simplified them both structurally and through the reduction in the total number of characters. 

As for Mandarin vs. Cantonese, this draws into question the spoken Chinese dialects. In general, Mandarin is considered the official dialect in China, a dialect understood by populations living in all regions of China. On the other hand, Cantonese is the dialect spoken only by the people in the southern province Guangdong (formerly Canton) and Hong Kong. Due to high population and emigration from these and other coastal area, Cantonese became widely spoken by Chinese living outside China. The choice between Mandarin and Cantonese is a proper question to ask in looking for interpreting service, but not for written languages. Believe or not, someone speaking Mandarin can be totally lost when attempting to speak to someone who only speaks Cantonese, but the written language of the two dialects is exactly identical except for a small number of expressions.

In conclusion, if your target market is mainland China, you will want to translate your documents into Simplified Chinese; if you are headed to Hong Kong or Taiwan you will use Traditional. We recommend translating into both languages if you will be covering both markets. However, if your budget does not allow you translate into both versions, our recommendation is to translate into Traditional Chinese. The reasoning here is that both written formats will be perfectly understood in just about any region, but you may find that your customers who use Traditional Chinese will be more sensitive to your language choice.