May 12, 2021
Add subtitles to one Adobe Captivate project for multiple languages
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May 12, 2021
Add subtitles to one Adobe Captivate project for multiple languages
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Hi!

I work for a software development company and do a lot of software demonstration videos. We are starting to work with more clients where English is their second language. We wondered if there is a way to create a video in English, but provide subtitles in different languages that users can select from within one Adobe Captivate project?

I know there is the Closed Captioning feature, but that seems like you can only have one language option and would have to create an Adobe Captivate project for every single language for the same software demonstration.

Is there a subtitle or translation-like feature that is available in Adobe Captivate? If so, what is it and where?

Thank you,

Danielle

7 Comments
2021-09-08 22:15:52
2021-09-08 22:15:52

I agree with paul, thats the easiest and efective option.

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2021-05-14 22:58:37
2021-05-14 22:58:37

Well, as you surmise, Captivate’s CC functionality isn’t going to be robust enough to support subtitles with multiple languages. I’ve done it in a single Captivate project by leveraging the cp API with Javascript, but the full solution is pretty involved.

Captivate keeps the captions as an array of objects in cp.D.Slide###.audCC for audio captions, and .vidCC for video captions. If you pull in captions from say a text file (I used .srt files named for the various languages that I created with Premiere Pro), you can parse the start frame, end frame, and text, and then instantiate a cc object and push it onto the array.

What I did was loop through cp.D.tocProperties.entries to get the slide IDs, and passed the ID and the file name of the caption file to a function that would add the captions. I ran the loop once when the project loads and whenever the language was switched.

By pasting the caption files into a folder in Applications/Adobe Captivate 2019/HTML/assets, I could load them using a jquery.get() method.

Paul Wilson ‘s approach is a lot simpler, but in my case my learners wouldn’t be able to access an external streaming service, so I had to get creative

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(5)
2021-05-13 17:39:45
2021-05-13 17:39:45

YouTube? For interactive projects? Strange….

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Lieve Weymeis
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2021-05-13 21:56:03
2021-05-13 21:56:03
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Lieve Weymeis
's comment

If multi-language closed captioning is a requirement of the project, I can’t think of another way. The original poster didn’t mention interactive video. If it’s an interactive video then yes, you would have to create multiple versions for each language and use interactive video (slide video).

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Paul Wilson
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2021-05-15 08:45:03
2021-05-15 08:45:03
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Paul Wilson
's comment

Bumping again on a lack of an ‘official’ glossary.  The OP talks about software ‘demonstrations’, but that can be passive video (with Video Demo) but also interactive Training simulations. Only for passive video the approach with YouTube will be valid (I don’t know for the JS solution mentioned by Chrisw…). I do not trust any term in a question anymore because at the end it often turns out to be something very different.

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2021-05-13 15:16:25
2021-05-13 15:16:25

What I would do is post your videos to Youtube or other video streaming services where multiple closed captions can be added for different languages. Add a web object to your Captivate slide and use the embed code for that video. This should give your learners the ability to turn on closed captions for their particular language. This bypasses the Captivate closed caption abilities, which are not very versatile anyway, and instead uses the superior captioning features that are available outside of the application.

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2021-05-13 08:41:49
2021-05-13 08:41:49

You will not appreciate my answer. I have used subtitles in one language while audio was in another language. Synchronizing is a pain in that case, because the big differences between languages.

There is no automatic translation in Captivate. You can export Closed Captions to Word (or XML), having them translated and import the translation. However you will still need to synchronize with the audio.

You’ll have to create duplicates of the project, and use a main menu project for the language choice. which brances to the different modules.  At this moment the best solution, also for maintenance reasons.

 

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