Same language subtitling
Encyclopedia
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
such as Doordarshan
DoorDarshan
Doordarshan is an Indian public service broadcaster, a division of Prasar Bharati. It is one of the largest broadcasting organizations in India in terms of the infrastructure of studios and transmitters. Recently, it has also started Digital Terrestrial Transmitters. On September 15, 2009,...
. This idea was struck upon by Brij Kothari
Brij Kothari
Dr. Brij Kothari is an Indian academic and a social entrepreneur. He invented Same Language Subtitling on TV for mass literacy in India.-Early life:...
, who believed that SLS makes reading practice an incidental, automatic, and subconscious part of popular TV entertainment, at a low per-person cost to shore up literacy rates in India
Literacy in India
Literacy in India is key for socio-economic progress, and the Indian literacy rate grew to 74.04% in 2011 from 12% at the end of British rule in 1947. Although this was a greater than sixfold improvement, the level is well below the world average literacy rate of 84%, and India currently has the...
.
SLS also refers to the classroom or educational use of Synchronized Captioning of Musical Lyrics (or any text with an Audio and/or Video source) as a Repeated Reading activity. The basic SLS reading activity involves students viewing a short subtitled presentation projected onscreen, while completing a response worksheet. Ideally, the subtitling should have high quality synchronization of audio and text, and text should change color in syllabic synchronization to audio model, and the source media should be dynamic and engaging.
History
Brij Kothari was watching a Spanish film on video with English subtitles during a break from dissertation writing in 1996 the thought hit him that if all Hindi film songs were subtitled in Hindi, on television in India, it would bring about a revolution in literacy. Upon completion of his academic pursuits Kothari returned to India. In late 1996 he joined the faculty of the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. While continuing to teach communication to MBA students, he started work on SLS and it became a project of IIM. The idea of SLS was first innovated, researched, pioneered and nationalized by the Centre for Educational Innovation, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad under Brij Kothari. The program took off on a national scale by August 2002.Historically, there have been many attempts to demonstrate that video captioning can impact learning for a wide range of readers. Before Kothari's study, most available research on captioning had demonstrated limited results. As a direct result of Kothari's success with subtitled music video there are several new related studies using technology and music video that are also showing remarkable results. Educational researchers are now advocating the addition of SLS style 'open' subtitling to music video on the web and across the world.
Implementation
During the last 10 years in India, SLS has been implemented on Doordarshan’s film song programmes in HindiHindi
Standard Hindi, or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi, also known as Manak Hindi , High Hindi, Nagari Hindi, and Literary Hindi, is a standardized and sanskritized register of the Hindustani language derived from the Khariboli dialect of Delhi...
, Bengali
Bengali language
Bengali or Bangla is an eastern Indo-Aryan language. It is native to the region of eastern South Asia known as Bengal, which comprises present day Bangladesh, the Indian state of West Bengal, and parts of the Indian states of Tripura and Assam. It is written with the Bengali script...
, Gujarati
Gujarati language
Gujarati is an Indo-Aryan language, and part of the greater Indo-European language family. It is derived from a language called Old Gujarati which is the ancestor language of the modern Gujarati and Rajasthani languages...
, Marathi
Marathi language
Marathi is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by the Marathi people of western and central India. It is the official language of the state of Maharashtra. There are over 68 million fluent speakers worldwide. Marathi has the fourth largest number of native speakers in India and is the fifteenth most...
, Telugu
Telugu language
Telugu is a Central Dravidian language primarily spoken in the state of Andhra Pradesh, India, where it is an official language. It is also spoken in the neighbouring states of Chattisgarh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Orissa and Tamil Nadu...
, Tamil
Tamil language
Tamil is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by Tamil people of the Indian subcontinent. It has official status in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and in the Indian union territory of Pondicherry. Tamil is also an official language of Sri Lanka and Singapore...
, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya
Oriya language
Oriya , officially Odia from November, 2011, is an Indian language, belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family. It is mainly spoken in the Indian states of Orissa and West Bengal...
, and Punjabi
Punjabi language
Punjabi is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by inhabitants of the historical Punjab region . For Sikhs, the Punjabi language stands as the official language in which all ceremonies take place. In Pakistan, Punjabi is the most widely spoken language...
. Thus, for each language the subtitles are in the same language as the audio.
As such SLS creates a “what you hear is what you read” response among viewers, thus, reinforcing weak reading skills automatically and subconsciously.
A 2002-2007 Nielsen-ORG study demonstrated that the ability to read a paragraph among schoolchildren jumped from 25% to 56% when exposed to 30 minutes a week of the Rangoli program with subtitles. Over 90% said they prefer having subtitles on songs owing to their interest in the lyrics.
Further reading
- Kothari, Brij; Takeda, Joe; Joshi, Ashok; Pandey, Avinash (2003). "Chapter 13: Same Language Subtitling: A Butterfly for Literacy?". Reading Beyond the Alphabet. SAGE Publishing. pp. 213-229. ISBN 0761997083.
- Classroom use of SLS