Captions and Translated Subtitles – Goldcast

Contents

Overview

With Goldcast's captions & subtitles features, you can offer speech-to-text captions and translated subtitles for all three session types: live, pre-recorded, and RTMP.

Captions display the speaker's words in the same language and may be helpful for people who are hard of hearing, deaf, or prefer to read along with speakers.
Subtitles translate these captions into different languages and can be helpful to those tuning in from different countries or who speak other languages than the speaker.

Enabling captions and translated subtitles

Things to remember:

Captions and subtitles MUST be enabled no less than 10 minutes before your event starts.
Sessions longer than 9 hours will not be recorded and cannot have captions enabled. Please get in touch with your CSM for further assistance if you require captions for a session longer than 9 hours.

Follow these steps to enable captions and/or subtitles for an event:

1. Log in to Goldcast Studio with your credentials.

2. Click the hamburger icon on the top left, and select the Events tab to get a list of all your events.

3. Click the event you want to edit from the Events list.

4. On the Event dashboard, click the Edit Event button in the top right corner of the screen.

5. In the Primary Language dropdown, select the language the speakers will speak during your event. This language will be presented as speech-to-text captions on the event stage.

- You can choose from Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish.
- Note that the primary language you select will also change the primary language of the event navigation bar, buttons, etc. For more information, check our help doc on Hosting an Event in Different Primary Languages with Captions and Subtitles.

6. Turn on the toggle button for Captions.

7. Once Captions are enabled, you will see the setting for Subtitles. You can turn on the toggle button for Subtitles (optional).

8. Click Save.

How can attendees view captions and subtitles?

Once captions are enabled for your event, attendees can hover over the stage and click the CC button on the bottom of the screen to turn on and off captions. Captions are supported for events hosted in spoken languages, including Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish.

If you have also enabled subtitles, attendees will see a dropdown button in the CC button. They can click to see a list of supported languages and select the one they want to view captions. Currently, Goldcast supports translated subtitles in Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Note: Dutch is not supported at this time - so, for example, a speaker speaking English cannot be subtitled in Dutch. However, a speaker speaking Dutch can be captioned in Dutch.

Testing captions and subtitles

If you want to test captions and subtitles, you will need to make a new event that is occurring at the time you want to test. An event must be live for the captions to generate, with recordings turned on.

Enabling captions in on-demand events

Organizers can now choose to enable captions and subtitles for their on-demand sessions. Once this is enabled for your event, attendees can turn on/off captions in the kebab menu on the bottom right of the stage.

Note: To enable this for your sessions, you can contact Goldcast support before your event starts and make sure that captions and subtitles are enabled for your live event.

Attendees watching the session on-demand can hover on the stage and click on the kebab menu to enable captions. By default, the captions will be off, and users can select Captions and then select the language from the options.

To turn off Captions, click on the menu -> Captions and then click Off.

Downloading transcripts

If you have enabled captions for your event, you can download them as a transcript after the event.

Here’s how to do it:

Log in to Goldcast Studio with your credentials.
Click the hamburger icon on the top left, and select the Events tab to get a list of all your events.
From the Events list, click the event for which you want to download the transcript.
Click Recordings on the left navigation menu. A list of recordings available for the event is displayed on the screen.
Click the recording for which you want to download the transcript.
Use the Download Transcripts button to download a zip file of transcripts in all supported languages.

Note: If you haven’t enabled captions for your event, you can raise a support ticket to the Goldcast support team. Your CSM would be able to generate the transcript for you. Once the transcripts have been generated, we will provide the link to download your transcripts as a zip file.

For more information, see our guide on Event and Room Recordings.

Viewing downloaded transcripts

Goldcast downloads transcripts as .vtt files. Once you have downloaded it, you can view and edit it in any text editor like Apple’s TextEdit or Microsoft’s Notepad.

Alternatively, you can play it as a subtitle file in VLC or a similar player to watch the event recording video (mp4) with the transcripts as subtitles. Here’s how you can perform this action:

Open VLC media player, go to the Media tab and click Open File to play the event recording mp4. For more help, check our guide on downloading event and room recordings.
Next, go to the Subtitle menu and click Add Subtitle File. Select the corresponding transcript file (.vtt) in your preferred language from the dialog box to display it as captions/subtitles along with your event recording.