NoCap Captions: Providing Subtitle for Content Creators

The growing global interest in personalised media content via streaming platforms have contributed to the rising number of content creators on platforms such as YouTube all around the world. Along with that, subtitles have been the medium that bridge the users of various demographic background with the media content that are in languages that are considered foreign to them. In Malaysia however, the majority of the content creators did not include accurate English subtitles in their content due to their incapability to navigate both English and Bahasa Melayu properly, which result in low-quality subtitle inclusion (from auto-generated YouTube CC). Due to that, we believe that locally based YouTube channels struggle to make their viewers grow locally and globally. A case study in 2013 on Digital Discovery Channel on YouTube on the other hand has proven the benefit of YouTube closed captioning where the channel recorded an increase in viewer engagement by 7.32% after the use of closed captions (3Play Media, 2021). To further test this finding, in this study, two videos from a local-based YouTube channel are chosen as the subject of observation. The researchers translated the contents and produced English closed captions that are suitable for the YouTube audience for both videos. Then, the view counts for 20 days before and 20 days after English close captions were added were recorded and compared. The primary data was gained from the YouTube Analytic system and the result reflected an increase in view counts after English closed captioning at 28% and 24% respectively. The findings indicate that the insertion of the English closed captions does influence the view count on a YouTube video and overall reflects the significance of proper YouTube subtitle translation and closed captioning in the industry of content creation.