How To Translate Subtitles On Zoom

In recent years, the world has become more accustomed to video calls and meetings. Microsoft Teams and Zoom are mainstays of most work-at-home ventures these days. But what happens if you need to speak to someone from a different country or someone who speaks a different language? What if you want to hold a Zoom webinar with a broad audience who speaks various languages? Luckily, Zoom has recently made this possible with translated live captions and subtitles. You now have the choice to allow transcribed subtitles on your Zoom meetings in real time or to document videos with Zoom and share them later with live captions.

Enable Captions in a Meeting

Translating captions to other languages in real-time on Zoom enables users to have the speech in their preferred languages. For example, you can translate the speaker's words into Chinese, Spanish, French, German, Ukrainian, etc.

Before the meeting commences, the organizer sets the live session to the available languages. Also, the attendees can allow captions and choose their preferred languages. We will look at how to use Happy Scribe as a third-party tool to produce translated captions in Zoom.

Go to the Happy Scribe translation service and sign up for an account or log in if you already have an existing profile. Change the settings to translate the spoken words into the languages you want.

Next is to join the meeting. You can either be a speaker or a participant, depending on your function.

As the organizer, you want to allow the subtitles on Zoom. Open the Zoom website or app. When it opens, scroll to "Settings" and tick on it.

Once you’re in “In Meeting (Advanced),” find the “Translated Captions” choice and tick the toggle to permit it. Enable "Closed Captioning" while doing this.

Sometimes, a dialog box will pop up, so if it does, tick “Enable” to verify your choice.

Next, tick the “Edit Translation Languages” button and choose the languages available in the meeting.

If you want to keep other users on your profile from being able to change this setting, tick the icon that looks like a lock and tick the word “Lock” to confirm.

Viewing Captions and Subtitles

Of course, the organizer needs to know how to turn on the captions and subtitles, but it’s just as crucial for attendees to understand how to watch them. Otherwise, the whole process was unnecessary! After generating the subtitles from Happyscribe, ensure it is in a compact format like SubRip or WebVTT.

Here’s how you can see captions and subtitles once the host has enabled them:

1. Select the “CC Live Transcript” on the toolbar at the bottom of the meeting toolbar.

2. Click “Show Subtitle”.

3. You’ll see subtitles at the bottom of your Zoom window. You can drag these to other places and position them anywhere on the window, as well.

Ensure that the style and size of the subtitled captions are in a readable format.

Subtitles will be white text on a black background by default, but you can change all this and more in the settings. Just Tick “CC Live Transcript” then “Subtitle Settings.”

Use Transcription

This is an excellent choice for attendees who feel that subtitles are distracting or miss the beginning of your webinar. It’s also a good choice for people who want to re-read parts of your webinar later or review something said during the meeting for clarification. You can use the live transcription choice to convert speech to text in Zoom webinars. The organizer enables this feature to allow the attendees to see the transcripts. As long as transcription is enabled, you can see it whenever you come on the live. Here’s how you see transcripts:

Go to Happyscribe.com and click on"Sign in". Input your sign-in details

1. Under “Meeting Controls,” tick “More” (…) and then “Captions.”

2. Find the “Your Caption Settings” button, and then tick “View Full Transcript.” Then, a panel will pop up and allow you to view the full transcript of the meeting.

3. For viewing later, tick “Save Transcript” at the bottom of the transcript panel.

4. You can also search the whole transcript for specific words using the search bar.

5. To hide the full transcript, tick the down arrow in the top right corner and tick “Close.”

Configuring Language Pairs

As the host, once you’ve enabled captions and interpreted subtitles, you must configure the language pairs used in your meeting. This is the speaking language input and the interpreted language output. So, if you plan on speaking in English but anticipate attendees who speak French, Chinese, and Spanish, you’d need to configure your language pairs to reflect that. It’s probably important to mention that all language pairs are selected by default, but configuring them will tailor them to suit your needs. Note that even though the supported language pair is set by default, the attendees can adjust it to suit their needs. Here’s how to configure language pairs in your meeting:

1. The first thing to do is to enable interpreted captions. Once you’ve allowed captions, tick “Edit Translation Languages.” A new window with translation languages will pop up.

2. In the “Speaking Language” section, check the box next to each language to indicate whether you want to include or exclude it as a speaking language.

3. For each language you’ve enabled under the “Speaking Language” section, locate the “Translate To” option and tick the drop-down box to choose which languages you want your subtitles interpreted.

4. You also have the choice to tick the “Select All Language Pairs” box to permit all the language pairs rather than going through the process of choosing each one individually.

5. Once you’ve chosen your language pairs, click “Save.”

Supported Languages

Unfortunately, Zoom transcription doesn’t support all languages. But it does support a good selection of them. Here are the languages currently supported by Zoom’s interpreted subtitles and captions. -Arabic -Chinese -Czech -Dutch -Estonian -Finnish -French -Hebrew -Hindi -Hungarian -German -Italian -Japanese -Korean -Polish -Portuguese -Spanish -Romanian -Russian -Turkish -Ukrainian -Vietnamese Hebrew, Hindi, Romanian translations are available from English only right now. And there are a handful of languages that can be interpreted from non-English languages. These include Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Prerequisites for Enabling Translated Subtitles and Captions on Zoom

The one major prerequisite of enabling subtitles and captions on Zoom is paying for the service. So long as you’re signed up for a paid Zoom plan, the Zoom interpreted Captions Add-on is only $5 monthly. Zoom paid plan pricing is as follows: -Pro: $149.90/year/user -Business: $199.90/year/user -Business Pro: $250/year/user For more pricing information or information about features, go here: https://zoom.us/pricing You also need to have: -Zoom desktop client -Windows 5.10.6 or higher -MacOS 5.10.6 or higher.

Translate Zoom Video with Happyscribe

Participants can both record videos from your webinar and transcribe them on their end, as well, so long as you’ve enabled live captions. Once your video is recorded, you can order a transcription. Here’s how a participant can use transcribed subtitles on Zoom videos using Happyscribe.

1. Go to your “Account Settings”.

2. Under the “Recordings” section, you can choose to record all calls with internal participants (all-hands, check-ins, brainstorms, reviews, etc.) or choose to record all calls from the webinar event organizer. This will leave you with a recorded Zoom video of the webinar.

3. Go to “Transcription,” then select your language.

• If you have an already recorded video, Go to Happyscribe, connect to your Zoom profile, and upload the recorded video. Perform the prompt for zoom authentication.

• Next is to upload the recorded file you wish to transcribe.

• Select the language you wish to transcribe.

• Choose the "Transcription" option and wait for your transcript.