Captioning vs. Transcription

How is a transcript different from captions?

 Captions

Captions appear onscreen simultaneously with the audio and video, and follow the same timing. Captions exists within the video player, and generally speaking, can’t be referenced outside of the video.

Movie with closed captions, "This is crazy. What did I do?"

 Transcript

A transcript is the same word-for-word content as captions, but presented in a separate document, whether it's a text file, word processing document, PDF, or web page. The transcript of a video could easily be generated from a script, if the video was scripted before production. If the video was not scripted, then the same process of transcribing the audio from the video into typed words is required.

Inclusive learning environment benefiting all learners.Below is YouTube's neat feature of creating a transcript based on YouTube's automatic generated captioning. By using the interactive transcript, students who are reviewing material can quickly navigate to specific parts of the video by using a keyword search. Let your students know about this helpful navigation!

YouTube transcript next to the incorrectly captioned video.

Notice Something Funny with These Captions?

On the YouTube screenshot above, the character's caption reads, "now throw it a pumpkin yeah I love peas truth." Ahh--those pesky YouTube English (auto-generated) captions! For videos you create, once you've manually entered new captions or edited the auto-generated captions, remember to delete the auto-generated caption track. YouTube will keep the auto-generated caption track and your newest edited caption track or uploaded transcript on file. 

Unfortunately, when your video is played, YouTube will automatically default to the English (auto-generated) caption unless it is removed.