Automated software video translation has arrived

One of the great challenges of modern SaaS applications is keeping the onboarding tools, technical documentation and videos up to date.

Agile engineering and releases means things change rapidly. While some of the very largest companies can limit the number of annual releases to two, most teams are faced with quarterly, monthly or more frequent releases. There are some great onboarding and tech pubs tools available in the market, but very little in the way of solutions for video automation and translation.

If you have frequent releases, keeping software videos up to date in multiple languages has been at best a nightmare and at worst impossible.

Until now.

Options for translating software videos

With a tech doc or help article, you can use a number of automated translation solutions from Google translate to Translation Management Systems. With video, you can include closed captions, which rely on text translation, and this is better than nothing. But historically, only two approaches have been available to create native language translation of videos.

1. Dub the audio in another language.

The downside is that the movement and navigation are no longer fully synchronized to the actual software. Phrases in foreign languages are not the same length as your primary language and technical jargon will most often not be translated.

And with every software release you will need to redo the audio dubbing. It’s actually worse than watching a movie when the actors' voices and lips are totally out of sync with the movie and the title is not even close to the original! 

2. Re-record the video in each language you offer

This is definitely not scalable for most software developers in their primary language. The frequency of releases makes it cost prohibitive once you have multiple languages.

Solving the translation problem with automation

Because Videate automates the production of software videos by starting with a script, the tools to translate your help articles or technical documentation can be applied to video translation.

When you translate the script, we regenerate the software video in the cloud by automatically re-synchronizing the software movement/navigation. In either the primary language or target language if you offer your product in multiple languages. Videate will create videos that can be maintained with each release by simply updating the script.

Imagine the use cases you deal with regularly.

Your branding team decides to change your logo or color scheme.

Or your product team changes a product name.

With Videate, you instantly update all your videos at once--including all of your different language videos. Automated software video translation has finally arrived.