The Interpreter's Tapestry

Sometimes, particularly in educational settings, we have videos that are uncaptioned that if we had some notice, we could either find a captioned version, or using the technique here, we could caption it.

*This is primarily recommended for short videos (15min) that are run using Windows Media Player.

(1) Download the video

(2) Type the script of the video and divide it into caption lines of about 30 characters. This can be done in two ways:

• Use a word processing program,
• Play the video and type the script, pressing enter when you miss some words and start typing again (this also helps develop auditory memory!),
• Once you have the whole script, divide into reasonable line lengths ,
• Transfer the lines into the captioning program using the directions listed below, but without needing to type,

OR

• Use the captioning program (Subtitle Workshop by URUWorks),
• Open the video file in the program,
• Open an new subtitle file,
• Play the video and type the line into the text box, selecting or creating a new line for each text line.

(3) Set the start and end times for showing each line during playback.

(4) Save as a SAMI Captioning file with the SAME FILE NAME AS THE VIDEO. This file also needs to be saved in the same folder as the video.

(5) Play the video in Windows Media Player. If the captions do not show, try the directions provided in Captioning Help.