M+E Europe

As demand for global content soars, it can be easy for media and entertainment companies to focus on driving efficiencies in subtitling and dubbing without including the other crucial information that supports it.

But correctly and efficiently localised metadata is essential to delivering engaging content to an international audience – and that is why TransPerfect has developed specific tools to manage this process in a way that is faster, more cost-effective and farther reaching than ever before, according to Tim Mapley, director of business development at TransPerfect.

By leveraging the company’s tool suite of cloud-based technology solutions developed over the past 25-plus years, TransPerfect can help M&E organisations ensure that their key names and phrases are consistent across all of their metadata and that all of their partners are using the correct terminology for their content.

TransPerfect’s tools use a single source of truth model, allowing real-time sharing, localising and managing of metadata holistically by one or many vendors across all of an organisation’s content.

Mapley’s role at TransPerfect is to “find new opportunities where we can improve the lives of our customers by leveraging our suite of technology solutions and to help them create efficiencies in their localisation journey,” he said Nov. 5 during the online Smart Content Summit EU event.

Although a lot of time is spent on exploring what that means for dubbing and subtitling, “an undeniable part of that journey is the metadata,” he pointed out during the AI & Metadata breakout session “Making the Most of Your Metadata.” And TransPerfect helps its clients do exactly that — “make the most of their metadata,” he noted.

“Innovation – it’s really at the heart of everything that we do as a company,” he told viewers. The innovative ways in which the company supports clients’ metadata can be broken down into four key areas, he said: Creation, translation, quality assurance (QA) and optimisation.

When it comes to metadata creation, the company has a division that reviews clients’ intellectual property and writes content for it in 180 languages simultaneously, “streamlining international launches,” he said.

“For some of our clients, we’re using our AI division to create internal-facing metadata,” he noted. What that means is “we have the ability to quickly and efficiently outsource the process reviewing and tagging large catalogues of content so that you’re able to quickly and effectively sort through your library” – and that, “in turn, is helping our clients to monetise their existing content and to start earning revenue from content that otherwise would just be sitting on the shelf,” he said. After all, “once you know what you have, you know how to apply it,” he added.

On the translation front, meanwhile, “we’re leveraging technology in our workflows to reduce the costs and delivery time of translating your metadata,” he told viewers. It “starts like all of our localisation workflows, with translation memory,” which he noted is “a database of your translations that we store and reuse to increase consistency and decrease cost.” One of the company’s policies: “We don’t believe we should be charging you to translate the same content twice,” he noted.

Moving on to QA, he cited a potential scenario: An organisation has one piece of metadata that works for one platform but exceeds the character length for another platform. You can change it yourself. But what if it is a language you or nobody else on your team speaks? “That becomes a bit of a pain,” he noted, adding: “What if it’s eight seasons of a show that you now need to adjust in eight different languages? That’s no longer a pain. That’s a problem.” And it becomes a bigger problem if you need to make the changes quickly to meet a deadline you are committed to.

But, he said: “We can take your content, put it into our system, feed in the parameters you need and see where changes need to be made. We can then assess where those changes need to be and go in and do that at scale.”

TransPerfect can also do that with images and can do it all simultaneously across multiple markets, he pointed out. “Wherever your content is going, we can support you end to end as a one-stop shop,” he said.

He concluded with search engine optimisation, calling that “another crucial service we provide to ensure that your content is reaching your viewers and making the biggest impact.” TransPerfect has experts handling this within each market who provides “in-market optimisation” and understand the local culture and what a company needs to do in each situation to reach its audience, he said.

Click here to access the full presentation.

Smart Content Summit EU was produced by MESA and MESA Europe, in association with CDSA, HITS and the Smart Content Council, which meets regularly to share best practices, evaluate emerging technologies and collaborate to accelerate the pace of transformation in our industry. The summit is sponsored by ATMECS, Cognizant, Deluxe, Digital Nirvana, Éclair, Eluvio, EIDR, Iyuno Media Group, TransPerfect, NAGRA, Premiere Digital, Zixi, Whip Media Group, AppTek and EIDR.