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About Us
Discover McGowan Transcriptions: Digital Transcription Agency. Our skilled in-house transcribers guarantee unmatched quality, while our AQR and MRS memberships ensure strict confidentiality adherence.
Closed Caption Transcription Services
Human Transcription Only
No AI or Automation
Fast Track Service
from 4 hours
Industry Leader
Established in 1993
Professional Closed Caption Transcriptions For Your Industry
At McGowan Transcriptions, we can provide premium quality closed captioning services that meet the highest standards in accuracy and comprehension. See below for more information on how we create closed captions and why they can help your organisation.
What Are Closed Captions?
Although similar to subtitles in some respects, there is actually a difference between subtitles and closed captions. Subtitles show the spoken words in a video – whether that’s exchanges between characters in a television show, or a transcription of a training video to make things clearer.
Closed captions provide more information than this, often working on the assumption that an audience cannot hear the audio. Captioning displays the dialogue in text form, as well as further information about the audio – for instance, describing background noises, sound effects, onomatopoeia, and music. They can also include important information about aspects like tone of voice to further aid understanding and comprehension of video content.
Closed caption formats can be turned on or off as necessary, making them a great option for those with hearing loss or deafness. They provide all the information that’s needed to understand the video and are an essential accessibility tool.
Closed captions are incorporated into video by creating a separate file that’s uploaded alongside the video file itself and synced using time stamps. Audiences can then choose whether or not to display the closed captions along with the video. This is in contrast to open captions, which are burned into media files and remain visible at all times.
Most online video services like YouTube offer the ability to display closed captions while television captions are embedded in the signal and are decoded by the television set. Closed captions are legally required for all broadcast television in the UK. Television captioning is also a legal requirement for online on-demand content.
YouTube now has an inbuilt automatically generated closed caption audio description service; however, this can be insufficient. Although one billion videos now feature closed captions, there has been criticism around the fact that the voice recognition can be inaccurate. If you’re serious about improving accessibility to your videos, we’d highly recommend the use of our professional closed captioning service, rather than an automated closed caption software.
The Benefits of Closed Captions
Reach 432 Million Adults with Hearing Loss
According to the World Health Organisation, 432 million adults and 34 million children suffer from hearing loss. Without closed captions, this group could struggle to understand the messages in your carefully prepared video.
Here at McGowan Transcriptions, we are pleased that we can help the deaf community gain access to video content more easily by adding captioning and transcripts to videos. Over the years, we have produced transcripts for many different purposes, ranging from sermons, webinars, adverts and workshops. We are committed to providing access for all.
As members of the Equality Register, we see it as our duty to research ways of making transcription, training materials, and videos – to name but a few – accessible to everyone.
Make Your Videos Search Engine Friendly
Videos have become increasingly widespread and more and more companies are using them for the purposes of marketing and communications. Some sources, such as Entrepreneur.com, claim that 80% of online content will be video within the next year.
Search Engine Optimisation is now an essential strategy for those looking to promote their website and earn more traffic. However, the content of a video cannot be accessed by search engine spiders and bots, meaning that your target audience may struggle to find your video.
When a closed caption file is added to a website, YouTube, Vimeo – and other platforms – instantly your video content becomes visible to bots. This is because it is a text file that bots can read to determine the content of your video and rank it accordingly. Make your video content as relevant to your service or product as you can, you will be filling your captions with plenty of keywords and phrases for the bots to index, improving your site’s overall presence in search engines.
This is where you can get ahead of your competitors: adding closed captions to videos should be top of your to-do list.
Improve Understanding
Subtitling services and video captions aren’t just useful for people with hearing loss. If you’ve ever watched a documentary and heard someone speaking in broken English, you will have noticed that subtitles are provided to assist with understanding.
This can also be the case if you are trying to reach an audience for whom English is not their first language. It may be easier for them to understand what you are saying in your video if they can read the words. For training videos, too, seeing the words on the screen can be a massive help in understanding terminology or jargon connected to your industry that may be unfamiliar to a trainee.
Professional Closed Captions
At McGowan Transcriptions, we can provide highly accurate, professional closed captions for a wide range of video content. This includes everything from corporate training videos and seminars, to YouTube content and television shows.
We can work with a wide range of video files and provide closed captioning services in whichever format and template you prefer. This includes adding time stamps and codes, making it seamless and easy for you to upload your captions alongside the content.
We have a fast turnaround time and have never missed a deadline, and we pride ourselves on offering an affordable and high quality service to help your video content reach every possible audience.
Simply get in touch to talk about your requirements and receive a quotation for your project.
Since our start in 1993, we have had the privilege of working subtitling company for many of the country’s leading businesses. The fact that many medical institutions, legal firms, and multinational companies trust us over other closed captioning companies with their words is something we do not take for granted. We are committed to always giving our best, making sure our customers are fully satisfied with the results. That is the feedback we get, and we are proud of that! Below are some of the companies we may call our customers.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What’s the difference between open and closed captioning?
Open captions are always in view on the screen and cannot be turned off. They are an integral part of the video. Closed captions, however, can be turned on or off by the viewer.
What are closed captioning services?
A closed captioning service involves a professional typist transcribing audio from videos into written text. This includes not just the dialogue but also the sounds as they happen on-screen. Closed captioning makes the message of a video more accessible for those who are hard of hearing, those who aren’t completely familiar with the language, or those who are watching the video from a distance (for example, a televised event in a bar).
Is closed caption the same as subtitles?
Captions are different from subtitles in that they transcribe all of the audio in a video, not just the dialogue. Subtitles work on the assumption that the audience can hear the audio, but maybe not the dialogue clearly. Captions work on the assumption that the audience cannot hear the audio at all. So captions will describe details such as the sound of water, footsteps, etc.
Who uses closed captioning?
There are an estimated 11 million people in the UK who are deaf, partially deaf, or hard of hearing. But closed captioning is not just beneficial for those with hearing difficulties. Captions are also useful for those who may not be familiar with the language of a given video, or who work in a noisy environment and may wish to understand what is being presented on a screen.
How accurate is closed captioning?
Professional closed caption transcribing is required to be 99% accurate. That is the industry standard — including grammar, punctuation and spelling. You can quickly book a professional transcriptionist here. Many YouTube videos and other online platforms offer auto-generated captioning services, but they are highly inaccurate and not recommended for anything other than casual content.
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