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Subtitle (captioning)
Encyclopedia
Subtitles are textual versions of the dialog in films and television programs, usually displayed at the bottom of the screen. They can either be a form of written translation
of a dialog in a foreign language, or a written rendering of the dialog in the same language, with or without added information to help viewers who are deaf and hard-of-hearing to follow the dialog, or people who cannot understand the spoken dialogue or who have accent recognition problems. Television teletext subtitles, which are hidden unless requested by the viewer from a menu or by selecting the relevant teletext
page (e.g., p. 888), always carry additional sound representations for deaf and hard of hearing viewers. Teletext subtitle language follows the original audio, except in multi-lingual countries where the broadcaster may provide subtitles in additional languages on other teletext pages.
Sometimes, mainly at film festival
s, subtitles may be shown on a separate display below the screen, thus saving the film-maker from creating a subtitled copy for perhaps just one showing. Television subtitling for the deaf and hard-of-hearing is also referred to as closed captioning
in some countries.
More exceptional uses also include operas, such as Verdi's Aida, where sung lyrics in Italian are subtitled in English or in another local language outside the stage area on luminous screens for the audience to follow the storyline.
if it is a work for electronic media (e.g., TV, video, DVD), or on film length (measured in feet and frames) if the subtitles are to be used for traditional cinema film.
The finished subtitle file is used to add the subtitles to the picture, either :
Subtitles can also be created by individuals using freely-available subtitle-creation software like Subtitle Workshop for Windows, MovieCaptioner for the Mac and Subtitle Composer for Linux, and then hardcode them onto a video file with programs such as VirtualDub
in combination with VSFilter
which could also be used to show subtitles as softsubs in many software video players
.
For multimedia-style Webcasting, check:
and in India
such as Doordarshan
. This idea was struck upon by Brij Kothari
, 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
.
(SLS) is the use of Synchronized Captioning of Musical Lyrics (or any text with an Audio/Video/ source) as a Repeated Reading activity. The basic reading activity involves students viewing a short subtitled presentation projected onscreen, while completing a response worksheet. To be really effective, the subtitling should have high quality synchronization of audio and text, and better yet, subtitling should change color in syllabic synchronization to audio model, and the text should be at a level to challenge students' language abilities.
Closed captioning
is the American term for closed subtitles specifically intended for people who are deaf and hard-of-hearing. These are a transcription rather than a translation, and usually contain descriptions of important non-dialog audio as well such as "(sighs)" or "(door creaks)". From the expression "closed captions" the word "caption" has in recent years come to mean a subtitle intended for the hard of hearing, be it "open" or "closed". In British English "subtitles" usually refers to subtitles for the hard-of-hearing (HoH); however, the term "HoH subtitles" is sometimes used when there is a need to make a distinction between the two.
and the United States
, as a result of regulations that stipulate that virtually all TV eventually must be accessible for people who are deaf and hard–of–hearing.
Some programs may be prepared in their entirety several hours before broadcast, but with insufficient time to prepare a timecoded caption file for automatic play-out. Pre-prepared captions look very similar to offline captions, although the accuracy of cueing may be compromised slightly as the captions are not locked to program timecode.
Newsroom captioning involves the automatic transfer of text from the newsroom computer system to a device which outputs it as captions. It does work, but its suitability as an exclusive system would only apply to programs which had been scripted in their entirety on the newsroom computer system, such as short interstitial updates.
In the United States and Canada, some broadcasters have used it exclusively and simply left uncaptioned sections of the bulletin for which a script was unavailable. Newsroom captioning limits captions to pre-scripted materials and, therefore, does not cover 100% of the news, weather and sports segments of a typical local news broadcast which are typically not pre-scripted, last second breaking news or changes to the scripts, ad lib conversations of the broadcasters, emergency or other live remote broadcasts by reporters in-the-field. By failing to cover items such as these, newsroom style captioning (or use of the Teleprompter
for captioning) typically results in coverage of less than 30% of a local news broadcast.
Communication Access Real-Time Translation (CART) stenographers, who use a computer with using either stenotype
or Velotype
keyboards to transcribe stenographic input for presentation as captions within 2–3 seconds of the representing audio, must caption anything which is purely live and unscripted, however, the most recent developments include operators using speech recognition
software and revoicing the dialog. Speech recognition technology has advanced so quickly in the United Kingdom that about 50% of all live captioning is through speech recognition as of 2005. Realtime captions look different from offline captions, as they are presented as a continuous flow of text as people speak.
Realtime stenographers are the most highly skilled in their profession. Stenography is a system of rendering words phonetically, and English, with its multitude of homophones (e.g., there, their, they’re), is particularly unsuited to easy transcriptions. Stenographers working in courts and inquiries usually have 24 hours in which to deliver their transcripts. Consequently they may enter the same phonetic stenographic codes for a variety of homophones, and fix up the spelling later. Realtime stenographers must deliver their transcriptions accurately and immediately. They must therefore develop techniques for keying homophones differently, and be unswayed by the pressures of delivering accurate product on immediate demand.
Submissions to recent captioning-related inquiries have revealed concerns from broadcasters about captioning sports. Captioning sports may also affect many different people because of the weather outside of it. In much sport captioning's absence, the Australian Caption Centre submitted to the National Working Party on Captioning (NWPC), in November 1998, three examples of sport captioning, each performed on tennis, rugby league and swimming programs:
The NWPC concluded that the standard they accept is the comprehensive realtime method, which gives them access to the commentary in its entirety. Also, not all sports are live. Many events are pre-recorded hours before they are broadcast, allowing them a captioner to caption them using offline methods.
Because different programs are produced under different conditions, a case-by-case basis must consequently determine captioning methodology. Some bulletins may have a high incidence of truly live material, or insufficient access to video feeds and scripts may be provided to the captioning facility, making stenography unavoidable. Other bulletins may be pre-recorded just before going to air, making pre-prepared text preferable.
In Australia and the United Kingdom, hybrid methodologies have proven to be the best way to provide comprehensive, accurate and cost-effective captions on news and current affairs programs. News captioning applications currently available are designed to accept text from a variety of inputs: stenography, Velotype, QWERTY
, ASCII import, and the newsroom computer. This allows one facility to handle a variety of online captioning requirements and to ensure that captioners properly caption all programs.
Current affairs programs usually require stenographic assistance. Even though the segments which comprise a current affairs program may be produced in advance, they are usually done so just before on-air time and their duration makes QWERTY input of text unfeasible.
News bulletins, on the other hand can often be captioned without stenographic input (unless there are live crosses or ad-libbing by the presenters). This is because:
For non-live, or pre-recorded programs, you can choose from two presentation styles models for offline captioning or transcription needs in English or Spanish.
Premiere Offline Captioning
Premiere Offline Captioning is geared toward the high-end television industry, providing highly customized captioning features, such as pop-on style captions, specialized screen placement, speaker identifications, italics, special characters, and sound effects.
Premiere Offline involves a five-step design and editing process, and does much more than simply display the text of a program. Premiere Offline helps the viewer follow a story line, become aware of mood and feeling, and allows them to fully enjoy the entire viewing experience. Premiere Offline is the preferred presentation style for entertainment-type programming. … 2002
|archiveurl = http://web.archive.org/web/20070729005348/http://www.captioncolorado.com/products/offline.html |archivedate = 2007-07-29}}
Offline captioning involves a five-step design and editing process, and does much more than simply display the text of a program. Offline captioning helps the viewer follow a story line, become aware of mood and feeling, and allows them to fully enjoy the entire viewing experience. Offline captioning is the preferred presentation style for entertainment-type programming.
The only significant difference for the user between "SDH" subtitles and "closed captions" is their appearance: SDH subtitles usually are displayed with the same proportional font used for the translation subtitles on the DVD; however, closed captions are displayed as white text on a black band, which blocks a large portion of the view. Closed captioning is falling out of favor as many users have no difficulty reading SDH subtitles, which are text with contrast outline. In addition, DVD subtitles can specify many colors, on the same character: primary, outline, shadow, and background. This allows subtitlers to display subtitles on a usually translucent band for easier reading; however, this is rare, since most subtitles use an outline and shadow instead, in order to block a smaller portion of the picture. Closed captions may still supersede DVD subtitles, since many SDH subtitles present all of the text centered, while closed captions usually specify position on the screen: centered, left align, right align, top, etc. This is very helpful for speaker identification and overlapping conversation. Some SDH subtitles (such as the subtitles of newer Universal Studios
DVDs/Blu-ray Discs) do have positioning, but it is not as common.
DVDs for the U.S. market now sometimes have three forms of English subtitles: SDH subtitles, English subtitles, helpful for viewers who are Hearing and whose first language may not be English (although they are usually an exact transcript and not edited into Simple English
), and closed caption data that is decoded by the end-user's closed caption decoder. Most anime releases in the U.S. only include as subtitles translations of the original material; therefore, SDH subtitles of English dubs ("dubtitles") are uncommon.
High-definition disc media (HD DVD
, Blu-ray Disc
) uses SDH subtitles as the sole method because technical specifications do not require HD to support line 21 closed captions. Some Blu-ray Discs, however, are said to carry a closed caption stream that only displays through standard-definition connections. Many HDTV
s allow the end–user to customize the captions, including the ability to remove the black band.
which are used in captioning.
In some East Asian countries, such as China, Korea and Japan, subtitling is common in some genres of television. In these languages, written text is less ambiguous than spoken text, so subtitling may offer a distinct advantage to aid comprehension. Although people in China generally speak Putonghua, the standard spoken language, different speakers have different accents due to their native dialects and subtitles bridge this gap (even though most programmes are in Putonghua) as most Chinese speakers understand the one standard form of written Chinese. Subtitling is also common in taped interviews during news broadcasts, as accents in East Asian languages can be difficult to understand by those unfamiliar with them.
In India
, Same Language Subtitling
(SLS) are common for films and music videos. SLS refers to the idea of subtitling in the same language as the audio. SLS is highlighted karaoke
style, that is, to speech. The idea of SLS was initiated to shore up literacy rates as SLS makes reading practice an incidental, automatic, and subconscious part of popular TV entertainment. This idea was well received by the Government of India
which now uses SLS on several national channels, including Doordarshan
.
Translation of subtitling is sometimes very different from the translation of written text. Usually, when a film or a TV program is subtitled, the subtitler watches the picture and listens to the audio sentence by sentence. The subtitler may or may not have access to a written transcript of the dialog. Especially in commercial subtitles, the subtitler often interprets what is meant, rather than translating how it is said, i.e. meaning being more important than form. The audience does not always appreciate this, and it can be frustrating to those who know some of the spoken language, because spoken language may contain verbal padding or culturally implied meanings, in confusing words, if not adapted in the written subtitles. The subtitler does this when the dialog must be condensed in order to achieve an acceptable reading speed. i.e. purpose being more important than form.
Especially in fansub
s, the subtitler may translate both form and meaning. The subtitler may also choose to display a note in the subtitles, usually in parentheses (“(” and “)”) or as a separate block of on-screen text. This allows the subtitler to preserve form and achieve an acceptable reading speed, by leaving the note on the screen, even after the character has finished speaking, to both preserve form and allow for understanding. For example, the Japanese language has multiple first-person pronouns (see Japanese pronouns
), and using one instead of another implies a different degree of politeness. In order to compensate, when translating to English, the subtitler may reformulate the sentence, add appropriate words and/or use notes.
s in Spanish. Since CC1 and CC2 share bandwidth, the Federal Communications Commission
(FCC) recommends translation subtitles be placed in CC3. CC4, which shares bandwidth with CC3, is also available, but programs very seldom use it.
, in which other actors record over the voices of the original actors in a different language, and lectoring, a form of voice-over
for fictional material where a narrator tells the audience what the actors are saying while their voices can be heard in the background. Lectoring is common for television in Russia, Poland, and a few other East European countries, while cinemas in these countries commonly show films dubbed or subtitled.
The preference for dubbing or subtitling in various countries is largely based on decisions taken in the late 1920s and early 1930s. With the arrival of sound film, the film importers in Germany
, Italy
, France
and Spain
decided to dub the foreign voices, while the rest of Europe elected to display the dialog as translated subtitles. The choice was largely due to financial reasons (subtitling is inexpensive and quick, while dubbing is very expensive and thus requires a very large audience to justify the cost), but during the 1930s it also became a political preference in Germany
, Italy
and Spain
; an expedient form of censorship
that ensured that foreign views and ideas could be stopped from reaching the local audience, as dubbing makes it possible to create a dialogue which is totally different from the original.
Dubbing is still the norm and favored form in these four countries, but the proportion of subtitling is slowly growing, mainly to save cost and turnaround-time, but also due to a growing acceptance among younger generations, who are better readers and increasingly have a basic knowledge of English (the dominant language in film and TV) and thus prefer to hear the original dialogue.
Nevertheless, in Spain, for example, only public TV channels show subtitled foreign films, usually at late night. It is extremely rare that any Spanish TV channel shows subtitled versions of TV programs, series or documentaries. In addition, only a small proportion of cinemas show subtitled films. Films with dialogue in Galician, Catalan or Basque are always dubbed, not subtitled, when they are shown in the rest of the country. Some non-Spanish-speaking TV stations subtitle interviews in Spanish; others do not.
In many Latin America
n countries, local network television will show dubbed versions of English-language programs and movies, while cable stations (often international) more commonly broadcast subtitled material. Preference for subtitles or dubbing varies according to individual taste and reading ability, and theaters may order two prints of the most popular films, allowing moviegoers to chose between dubbing or subtitles. Animation and children's programming, however, is nearly universally dubbed, as in other regions.
Since the introduction of the DVD, some high budget films include the simultaneous option of both subtitles and/or dubbing. Often in such cases, the translations are made separately, rather than the subtitles being a verbatim transcript of the dubbed scenes of the film. While this allows for the smoothest possible flow of the subtitles, it can be frustrating for someone attempting to learn a foreign language.
In the traditional subtitling countries, dubbing is generally regarded as something very strange and unnatural and is only used for animated films and TV programs intended for pre-school children. As animated films are "dubbed" even in their original language and ambient noise and effects are usually recorded on a separate sound track, dubbing a low quality production into a second language produces little or no noticeable effect on the viewing experience. In dubbed live-action television or film, however, viewers are often distracted by the fact that the audio does not match the actors' lip movements. Furthermore, the dubbed voices may seem detached, inappropriate for the character, or overly expressive, and some ambient sounds may not be transferred to the dubbed track, creating a less enjoyable viewing experience.
It is also common that television services in minority languages subtitle their programmes in the dominating language as well. Examples include the Welsh
S4C
and Irish
TG4
who subtitle in English
and the Swedish
FST5 in Finland who subtitle in the majority language Finnish
.
In Wallonia (Belgium) films are usually dubbed, but sometimes they are played on two channels at the same time: one dubbed (on La Une) and the other subtitled (on La Deux), but this is no longer done as frequently due to low ratings.
In Australia, one FTA
network, SBS
airs its foreign-language shows subtitled in English.
While distributing content, subtitles can appear in one of 3 types:
In other categorization, digital video subtitles are sometimes called internal, if they are embedded in a single video file container along with video and audio streams, and external if they are distributed as separate file (that is less convenient, but it is easier to edit/change such file).
There are still many more uncommon formats. Most of them are text-based and have the extension .txt.
For movies on DVD Video:
For TV broadcast:
Subtitles created for TV broadcast are stored in a variety of file formats. The majority of these formats are proprietary to the vendors of subtitle insertion systems.
Broadcast subtitle formats include:
.XIF
.X32
.PAC
.RAC
.CHK
.AYA
.890
.CIP
.CAP
.ULT
.USF
.CIN
.L32
.ST4
.ST7
.TIT
.STL
The EBU format defined by Technical Reference 3264-E is an 'open' format intended for subtitle exchange between broadcasters. Files in this format have the extension .stl (not to be mixed up with text "Spruce subtitle format" mentioned above, which also has extension .stl)
For internet delivery:
The Timed Text format currently a "Candidate Recommendation" of the W3C (called DFXP) is also proposed as an 'open' format for subtitle exchange and distribution to media players, such as Microsoft Silverlight.
. The Persian language
dialogue spoken by the Iranian characters is not subtitled because the main character Betty Mahmoody does not speak Persian and the audience is seeing the film from her viewpoint.
One unintentional source of humor in subtitles comes from illegal DVDs produced in non-English-speaking countries (esp. China). These DVDs often contain poorly-worded subtitle tracks, possibly produced by machine translation
, with humorous results. One of the better-known examples is a copy of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
whose opening title was subtitled, "Star war: The backstroke of the west". http://winterson.com/2005/06/episode-iii-backstroke-of-west.html
Translation
Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. Whereas interpreting undoubtedly antedates writing, translation began only after the appearance of written literature; there exist partial translations of the Sumerian Epic of...
of a dialog in a foreign language, or a written rendering of the dialog in the same language, with or without added information to help viewers who are deaf and hard-of-hearing to follow the dialog, or people who cannot understand the spoken dialogue or who have accent recognition problems. Television teletext subtitles, which are hidden unless requested by the viewer from a menu or by selecting the relevant teletext
Teletext
Teletext is a television information retrieval service developed in the United Kingdom in the early 1970s. It offers a range of text-based information, typically including national, international and sporting news, weather and TV schedules...
page (e.g., p. 888), always carry additional sound representations for deaf and hard of hearing viewers. Teletext subtitle language follows the original audio, except in multi-lingual countries where the broadcaster may provide subtitles in additional languages on other teletext pages.
Sometimes, mainly at film festival
Film festival
A film festival is an organised, extended presentation of films in one or more movie theaters or screening venues, usually in a single locality. More and more often film festivals show part of their films to the public by adding outdoor movie screenings...
s, subtitles may be shown on a separate display below the screen, thus saving the film-maker from creating a subtitled copy for perhaps just one showing. Television subtitling for the deaf and hard-of-hearing is also referred to as closed captioning
Closed captioning
Closed captioning is the process of displaying text on a television, video screen or other visual display to provide additional or interpretive information to individuals who wish to access it...
in some countries.
More exceptional uses also include operas, such as Verdi's Aida, where sung lyrics in Italian are subtitled in English or in another local language outside the stage area on luminous screens for the audience to follow the storyline.
Creation, delivery and display of subtitles
Today professional subtitlers usually work with specialized computer software and hardware where the video is digitally stored on a hard disk, making each individual frame instantly accessible. Besides creating the subtitles, the subtitler usually also tells the computer software the exact positions where each subtitle should appear and disappear. For cinema film, this task is traditionally done by separate technicians. The end result is a subtitle file containing the actual subtitles as well as position markers indicating where each subtitle should appear and disappear. These markers are usually based on timecodeSMPTE time code
SMPTE timecode is a set of cooperating standards to label individual frames of video or film with a time code defined by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers in the SMPTE 12M specification...
if it is a work for electronic media (e.g., TV, video, DVD), or on film length (measured in feet and frames) if the subtitles are to be used for traditional cinema film.
The finished subtitle file is used to add the subtitles to the picture, either :
- directly into the picture (open subtitles);
- embedded in the vertical interval and later superimposed on the picture by the end user with the help of an external decoder or a decoder built into the TV (closed subtitles on TV or video);
- or converted (rendered) to tiffTagged Image File FormatTIFF is a file format for storing images, popular among graphic artists, the publishing industry, and both amateur and professional photographers in general. As of 2009, it is under the control of Adobe Systems...
or bmp graphics that are later superimposed on the picture by the end user's equipment (closed subtitles on DVD or as part of a DVB broadcast).
Subtitles can also be created by individuals using freely-available subtitle-creation software like Subtitle Workshop for Windows, MovieCaptioner for the Mac and Subtitle Composer for Linux, and then hardcode them onto a video file with programs such as VirtualDub
VirtualDub
VirtualDub is a video capture and video processing utility for Microsoft Windows written by Avery Lee.It is designed to process linear video streams, including filtering and recompression...
in combination with VSFilter
VSFilter
DirectVobSub formerly known as VSFilter is a software add-on for Microsoft Windows that is able to read external subtitle files and superimposes them on a playing video file....
which could also be used to show subtitles as softsubs in many software video players
Video player (software)
A video player is a kind of media player for playing back digital video data from media such as optical discs , as well as from files of appropriate formats such as MPEG, AVI, RealVideo, and QuickTime....
.
For multimedia-style Webcasting, check:
- SMIL Synchronized Multimedia Integration LanguageSynchronized Multimedia Integration LanguageSMIL , the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language, is a W3C recommended XML markup language for describing multimedia presentations. It defines markup for timing, layout, animations, visual transitions, and media embedding, among other things...
; - Timed TextTimed TextTimed Text refers to the presentation of text media in synchrony with other media, such as audio and video.Typical applications of timed text are the real time subtitling of foreign-language movies on the Web, captioning for people lacking audio devices or having hearing impairments, karaoke,...
DFXP.
Same language captions
Same language captions, i.e., without translation, were primarily intended as an aid for people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing. Internationally, there are several major studies which demonstrate that same-language-captioning can have a major impact on literacy and reading growth across a broad range of reading abilities. This method of subtitling is used by national television broadcasters in ChinaChina
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
and in India
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...
.
Same-Language-Subtitling
Same Language SubtitlingSame language subtitling
Same language subtitling refers to the practice of subtitling programs on TV in the same language as the audio. This method of subtitling is used by national television broadcasters in India such as Doordarshan...
(SLS) is the use of Synchronized Captioning of Musical Lyrics (or any text with an Audio/Video/ source) as a Repeated Reading activity. The basic reading activity involves students viewing a short subtitled presentation projected onscreen, while completing a response worksheet. To be really effective, the subtitling should have high quality synchronization of audio and text, and better yet, subtitling should change color in syllabic synchronization to audio model, and the text should be at a level to challenge students' language abilities.
Closed captions
Closed captioning
Closed captioning is the process of displaying text on a television, video screen or other visual display to provide additional or interpretive information to individuals who wish to access it...
is the American term for closed subtitles specifically intended for people who are deaf and hard-of-hearing. These are a transcription rather than a translation, and usually contain descriptions of important non-dialog audio as well such as "(sighs)" or "(door creaks)". From the expression "closed captions" the word "caption" has in recent years come to mean a subtitle intended for the hard of hearing, be it "open" or "closed". In British English "subtitles" usually refers to subtitles for the hard-of-hearing (HoH); however, the term "HoH subtitles" is sometimes used when there is a need to make a distinction between the two.
Realtime
Programs such as news bulletins, current affairs programs, sport, some talk shows and political and special events utilize realtime or online captioning. Live captioning is increasingly common, especially in the United KingdomUnited Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
and the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, as a result of regulations that stipulate that virtually all TV eventually must be accessible for people who are deaf and hard–of–hearing.
Pre-prepared
Some programs may be prepared in their entirety several hours before broadcast, but with insufficient time to prepare a timecoded caption file for automatic play-out. Pre-prepared captions look very similar to offline captions, although the accuracy of cueing may be compromised slightly as the captions are not locked to program timecode.
Newsroom captioning involves the automatic transfer of text from the newsroom computer system to a device which outputs it as captions. It does work, but its suitability as an exclusive system would only apply to programs which had been scripted in their entirety on the newsroom computer system, such as short interstitial updates.
In the United States and Canada, some broadcasters have used it exclusively and simply left uncaptioned sections of the bulletin for which a script was unavailable. Newsroom captioning limits captions to pre-scripted materials and, therefore, does not cover 100% of the news, weather and sports segments of a typical local news broadcast which are typically not pre-scripted, last second breaking news or changes to the scripts, ad lib conversations of the broadcasters, emergency or other live remote broadcasts by reporters in-the-field. By failing to cover items such as these, newsroom style captioning (or use of the Teleprompter
Teleprompter
An autocue is a display device that prompts the person speaking with an electronic visual text of a speech or script. Using a teleprompter is similar to the practice of using cue cards...
for captioning) typically results in coverage of less than 30% of a local news broadcast.
Live
Communication Access Real-Time Translation (CART) stenographers, who use a computer with using either stenotype
Stenotype
A stenotype, stenotype machine or shorthand machine is a specialized chorded keyboard or typewriter used by stenographers for shorthand use...
or Velotype
Velotype
Velotype is the old trademark for a type of keyboard for typing text known as a syllabic chord keyboard, an invention of the Dutchmen Nico Berkelmans and Marius den Outer. The current tradename is Veyboard...
keyboards to transcribe stenographic input for presentation as captions within 2–3 seconds of the representing audio, must caption anything which is purely live and unscripted, however, the most recent developments include operators using speech recognition
Speech recognition
Speech recognition converts spoken words to text. The term "voice recognition" is sometimes used to refer to recognition systems that must be trained to a particular speaker—as is the case for most desktop recognition software...
software and revoicing the dialog. Speech recognition technology has advanced so quickly in the United Kingdom that about 50% of all live captioning is through speech recognition as of 2005. Realtime captions look different from offline captions, as they are presented as a continuous flow of text as people speak.
Realtime stenographers are the most highly skilled in their profession. Stenography is a system of rendering words phonetically, and English, with its multitude of homophones (e.g., there, their, they’re), is particularly unsuited to easy transcriptions. Stenographers working in courts and inquiries usually have 24 hours in which to deliver their transcripts. Consequently they may enter the same phonetic stenographic codes for a variety of homophones, and fix up the spelling later. Realtime stenographers must deliver their transcriptions accurately and immediately. They must therefore develop techniques for keying homophones differently, and be unswayed by the pressures of delivering accurate product on immediate demand.
Submissions to recent captioning-related inquiries have revealed concerns from broadcasters about captioning sports. Captioning sports may also affect many different people because of the weather outside of it. In much sport captioning's absence, the Australian Caption Centre submitted to the National Working Party on Captioning (NWPC), in November 1998, three examples of sport captioning, each performed on tennis, rugby league and swimming programs:
- Heavily reduced: Captioners ignore commentary and provide only scores and essential information such as “try” or “out”.
- Significantly reduced: Captioners use QWERTYQWERTYQWERTY is the most common modern-day keyboard layout. The name comes from the first six letters appearing in the topleft letter row of the keyboard, read left to right: Q-W-E-R-T-Y. The QWERTY design is based on a layout created for the Sholes and Glidden typewriter and sold to Remington in the...
input to type summary captions yielding the essence of what the commentators are saying, delayed due to the limitations of QWERTY input. - Comprehensive realtime: Captioners use stenography to caption the commentary in its entirety.
The NWPC concluded that the standard they accept is the comprehensive realtime method, which gives them access to the commentary in its entirety. Also, not all sports are live. Many events are pre-recorded hours before they are broadcast, allowing them a captioner to caption them using offline methods.
Hybrid
Because different programs are produced under different conditions, a case-by-case basis must consequently determine captioning methodology. Some bulletins may have a high incidence of truly live material, or insufficient access to video feeds and scripts may be provided to the captioning facility, making stenography unavoidable. Other bulletins may be pre-recorded just before going to air, making pre-prepared text preferable.
In Australia and the United Kingdom, hybrid methodologies have proven to be the best way to provide comprehensive, accurate and cost-effective captions on news and current affairs programs. News captioning applications currently available are designed to accept text from a variety of inputs: stenography, Velotype, QWERTY
QWERTY
QWERTY is the most common modern-day keyboard layout. The name comes from the first six letters appearing in the topleft letter row of the keyboard, read left to right: Q-W-E-R-T-Y. The QWERTY design is based on a layout created for the Sholes and Glidden typewriter and sold to Remington in the...
, ASCII import, and the newsroom computer. This allows one facility to handle a variety of online captioning requirements and to ensure that captioners properly caption all programs.
Current affairs programs usually require stenographic assistance. Even though the segments which comprise a current affairs program may be produced in advance, they are usually done so just before on-air time and their duration makes QWERTY input of text unfeasible.
News bulletins, on the other hand can often be captioned without stenographic input (unless there are live crosses or ad-libbing by the presenters). This is because:
- Most items are scripted on the newsroom computer system and this text can be electronically imported into the captioning system.
- Individual news stories are of short duration, so even if they are made available only just prior to broadcast, there is still time to QWERTY in text.
Offline
For non-live, or pre-recorded programs, television program providers can choose offline captioning. Captioners gear offline captioning toward the high-end television industry, providing highly customized captioning features, such as pop-on style captions, specialized screen placement, speaker identifications, italics, special characters, and sound effects.For non-live, or pre-recorded programs, you can choose from two presentation styles models for offline captioning or transcription needs in English or Spanish.
Premiere Offline Captioning
Premiere Offline Captioning is geared toward the high-end television industry, providing highly customized captioning features, such as pop-on style captions, specialized screen placement, speaker identifications, italics, special characters, and sound effects.
Premiere Offline involves a five-step design and editing process, and does much more than simply display the text of a program. Premiere Offline helps the viewer follow a story line, become aware of mood and feeling, and allows them to fully enjoy the entire viewing experience. Premiere Offline is the preferred presentation style for entertainment-type programming. … 2002
|archiveurl = http://web.archive.org/web/20070729005348/http://www.captioncolorado.com/products/offline.html |archivedate = 2007-07-29}}
Offline captioning involves a five-step design and editing process, and does much more than simply display the text of a program. Offline captioning helps the viewer follow a story line, become aware of mood and feeling, and allows them to fully enjoy the entire viewing experience. Offline captioning is the preferred presentation style for entertainment-type programming.
SDH
"SDH" is an American term the DVD industry introduced. It is an acronym for "Subtitles for the deaf and hard-of-hearing", and refers to regular subtitles in the original language where important non-dialog audio has been added, as well as speaker identification, useful when the viewer cannot otherwise visually tell who is saying what.The only significant difference for the user between "SDH" subtitles and "closed captions" is their appearance: SDH subtitles usually are displayed with the same proportional font used for the translation subtitles on the DVD; however, closed captions are displayed as white text on a black band, which blocks a large portion of the view. Closed captioning is falling out of favor as many users have no difficulty reading SDH subtitles, which are text with contrast outline. In addition, DVD subtitles can specify many colors, on the same character: primary, outline, shadow, and background. This allows subtitlers to display subtitles on a usually translucent band for easier reading; however, this is rare, since most subtitles use an outline and shadow instead, in order to block a smaller portion of the picture. Closed captions may still supersede DVD subtitles, since many SDH subtitles present all of the text centered, while closed captions usually specify position on the screen: centered, left align, right align, top, etc. This is very helpful for speaker identification and overlapping conversation. Some SDH subtitles (such as the subtitles of newer Universal Studios
Universal Studios
Universal Pictures , a subsidiary of NBCUniversal, is one of the six major movie studios....
DVDs/Blu-ray Discs) do have positioning, but it is not as common.
DVDs for the U.S. market now sometimes have three forms of English subtitles: SDH subtitles, English subtitles, helpful for viewers who are Hearing and whose first language may not be English (although they are usually an exact transcript and not edited into Simple English
Basic English
Basic English, also known as Simple English, is an English-based controlled language created by linguist and philosopher Charles Kay Ogden as an international auxiliary language, and as an aid for teaching English as a Second Language...
), and closed caption data that is decoded by the end-user's closed caption decoder. Most anime releases in the U.S. only include as subtitles translations of the original material; therefore, SDH subtitles of English dubs ("dubtitles") are uncommon.
High-definition disc media (HD DVD
HD DVD
HD DVD is a discontinued high-density optical disc format for storing data and high-definition video.Supported principally by Toshiba, HD DVD was envisioned to be the successor to the standard DVD format...
, Blu-ray Disc
Blu-ray Disc
Blu-ray Disc is an optical disc storage medium designed to supersede the DVD format. The plastic disc is 120 mm in diameter and 1.2 mm thick, the same size as DVDs and CDs. Blu-ray Discs contain 25 GB per layer, with dual layer discs being the norm for feature-length video discs...
) uses SDH subtitles as the sole method because technical specifications do not require HD to support line 21 closed captions. Some Blu-ray Discs, however, are said to carry a closed caption stream that only displays through standard-definition connections. Many HDTV
High-definition television
High-definition television is video that has resolution substantially higher than that of traditional television systems . HDTV has one or two million pixels per frame, roughly five times that of SD...
s allow the end–user to customize the captions, including the ability to remove the black band.
Use by those not deaf or hard-of-hearing
Although same-language subtitles and captions are produced primarily with the deaf and hard-of-hearing in mind, many hearing film and television viewers choose to use them. This is often done because the presence of closed captioning and subtitles ensures that not one word of dialogue will be missed. Bars and other noisy public places often make closed captions visible for patrons where dialogue would otherwise be drowned out. Films and television shows often have subtitles displayed in the same language, if the speaker has a speech impairment. In addition, captions may further reveal information that would be difficult to pick up on otherwise. Some examples of this would be the song lyrics; dialog spoken quietly or by those with accents unfamiliar to the intended audience; or supportive, minor dialog from background characters. It is argued that such additional information and detail will enhance the overall experience and allow the viewer a better grasp on the material. Furthermore, people learning a foreign language may sometimes use same-language subtitles to better understand the dialog while not having to resort to a translation.Asia
In some Asian television programming, captioning is considered a part of the genre, and has evolved beyond simply capturing what is being said. The captions are used artistically; it is common to see the words appear one by one as they are spoken, in a multitude of fonts, colors, and sizes that capture the spirit of what is being said. Languages like Japanese also have a rich vocabulary of onomatopoeiaJapanese sound symbolism
This article describes sound symbolic or mimetic words in the Japanese language. Most languages have such words; for example, "bang", "zap", "ding", "slither", "pop", etc. in English. Sound symbolic words occur more often in Japanese than in English—they are found in formal as well as vernacular...
which are used in captioning.
East Asia
In some East Asian countries, such as China, Korea and Japan, subtitling is common in some genres of television. In these languages, written text is less ambiguous than spoken text, so subtitling may offer a distinct advantage to aid comprehension. Although people in China generally speak Putonghua, the standard spoken language, different speakers have different accents due to their native dialects and subtitles bridge this gap (even though most programmes are in Putonghua) as most Chinese speakers understand the one standard form of written Chinese. Subtitling is also common in taped interviews during news broadcasts, as accents in East Asian languages can be difficult to understand by those unfamiliar with them.
South Asia
In India
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...
, Same Language Subtitling
Same language subtitling
Same language subtitling refers to the practice of subtitling programs on TV in the same language as the audio. This method of subtitling is used by national television broadcasters in India such as Doordarshan...
(SLS) are common for films and music videos. SLS refers to the idea of subtitling in the same language as the audio. SLS is highlighted karaoke
Karaoke
is a form of interactive entertainment or video game in which amateur singers sing along with recorded music using a microphone and public address system. The music is typically a well-known pop song minus the lead vocal. Lyrics are usually displayed on a video screen, along with a moving symbol,...
style, that is, to speech. The idea of SLS was initiated to shore up literacy rates as SLS makes reading practice an incidental, automatic, and subconscious part of popular TV entertainment. This idea was well received by the Government of India
Government of India
The Government of India, officially known as the Union Government, and also known as the Central Government, was established by the Constitution of India, and is the governing authority of the union of 28 states and seven union territories, collectively called the Republic of India...
which now uses SLS on several national channels, including 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,...
.
Translation
Subtitles can be used to translate dialog from a foreign language to the native language of the audience. It is the quickest and the cheapest method of translating content, and is usually praised for the possibility to hear the original dialog and voices of the actors.Translation of subtitling is sometimes very different from the translation of written text. Usually, when a film or a TV program is subtitled, the subtitler watches the picture and listens to the audio sentence by sentence. The subtitler may or may not have access to a written transcript of the dialog. Especially in commercial subtitles, the subtitler often interprets what is meant, rather than translating how it is said, i.e. meaning being more important than form. The audience does not always appreciate this, and it can be frustrating to those who know some of the spoken language, because spoken language may contain verbal padding or culturally implied meanings, in confusing words, if not adapted in the written subtitles. The subtitler does this when the dialog must be condensed in order to achieve an acceptable reading speed. i.e. purpose being more important than form.
Especially in fansub
Fansub
A fansub is a version of a foreign film or foreign television program which has been translated by fans and subtitled into a language other than that of the original.-History:...
s, the subtitler may translate both form and meaning. The subtitler may also choose to display a note in the subtitles, usually in parentheses (“(” and “)”) or as a separate block of on-screen text. This allows the subtitler to preserve form and achieve an acceptable reading speed, by leaving the note on the screen, even after the character has finished speaking, to both preserve form and allow for understanding. For example, the Japanese language has multiple first-person pronouns (see Japanese pronouns
Japanese pronouns
Pronouns are used less frequently in the Japanese language than in many other languages, mainly because there is no grammatical requirement to include the subject in a sentence. So, pronouns can seldomly be translated from English to Japanese on a one-on-one basis.The common, English pronouns, such...
), and using one instead of another implies a different degree of politeness. In order to compensate, when translating to English, the subtitler may reformulate the sentence, add appropriate words and/or use notes.
Realtime
Realtime translation subtitling, usually involving simultaneous interpreter listening to the dialog quickly translating, while a stenographer types, is rare. The unavoidable delay, typing errors, lack of editing, and high costs regard very little need for translation subtitling. Allowing the interpreter to directly speak to the viewers is usually both cheaper and quicker, however, the translation is not accessible to people who are deaf and hard–of–hearing.Offline
Some subtitlers purposely provide edited subtitles or captions, to match the needs of their audience, for learners of the spoken dialog as a second or foreign language, visual learners, beginning readers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing and for people with learning and/or mental disabilities. For example, for many of its films and television programs, PBS displays standard captions representing speech the program audio, word-for-word, if the viewer selects "CC1", by using the television remote control or on-screen menu, however, they also provide edited captions to present simplified sentences at a slower rate, if the viewer selects "CC2". Programs with a very diverse audience also often have captions in another language. This is common with popular Latin American soap operaSoap opera
A soap opera, sometimes called "soap" for short, is an ongoing, episodic work of dramatic fiction presented in serial format on radio or as television programming. The name soap opera stems from the original dramatic serials broadcast on radio that had soap manufacturers, such as Procter & Gamble,...
s in Spanish. Since CC1 and CC2 share bandwidth, the Federal Communications Commission
Federal Communications Commission
The Federal Communications Commission is an independent agency of the United States government, created, Congressional statute , and with the majority of its commissioners appointed by the current President. The FCC works towards six goals in the areas of broadband, competition, the spectrum, the...
(FCC) recommends translation subtitles be placed in CC3. CC4, which shares bandwidth with CC3, is also available, but programs very seldom use it.
Subtitles vs. dubbing and lectoring
The two alternative methods of 'translating' films in a foreign language are dubbingDubbing (filmmaking)
Dubbing is the post-production process of recording and replacing voices on a motion picture or television soundtrack subsequent to the original shooting. The term most commonly refers to the substitution of the voices of the actors shown on the screen by those of different performers, who may be...
, in which other actors record over the voices of the original actors in a different language, and lectoring, a form of voice-over
Voice-over
Voice-over is a production technique where a voice which is not part of the narrative is used in a radio, television production, filmmaking, theatre, or other presentations...
for fictional material where a narrator tells the audience what the actors are saying while their voices can be heard in the background. Lectoring is common for television in Russia, Poland, and a few other East European countries, while cinemas in these countries commonly show films dubbed or subtitled.
The preference for dubbing or subtitling in various countries is largely based on decisions taken in the late 1920s and early 1930s. With the arrival of sound film, the film importers in Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
, Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
, France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
and Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
decided to dub the foreign voices, while the rest of Europe elected to display the dialog as translated subtitles. The choice was largely due to financial reasons (subtitling is inexpensive and quick, while dubbing is very expensive and thus requires a very large audience to justify the cost), but during the 1930s it also became a political preference in Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
, Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
and Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
; an expedient form of censorship
Censorship
thumb|[[Book burning]] following the [[1973 Chilean coup d'état|1973 coup]] that installed the [[Military government of Chile |Pinochet regime]] in Chile...
that ensured that foreign views and ideas could be stopped from reaching the local audience, as dubbing makes it possible to create a dialogue which is totally different from the original.
Dubbing is still the norm and favored form in these four countries, but the proportion of subtitling is slowly growing, mainly to save cost and turnaround-time, but also due to a growing acceptance among younger generations, who are better readers and increasingly have a basic knowledge of English (the dominant language in film and TV) and thus prefer to hear the original dialogue.
Nevertheless, in Spain, for example, only public TV channels show subtitled foreign films, usually at late night. It is extremely rare that any Spanish TV channel shows subtitled versions of TV programs, series or documentaries. In addition, only a small proportion of cinemas show subtitled films. Films with dialogue in Galician, Catalan or Basque are always dubbed, not subtitled, when they are shown in the rest of the country. Some non-Spanish-speaking TV stations subtitle interviews in Spanish; others do not.
In many Latin America
Latin America
Latin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages – particularly Spanish and Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,500 km² , almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area...
n countries, local network television will show dubbed versions of English-language programs and movies, while cable stations (often international) more commonly broadcast subtitled material. Preference for subtitles or dubbing varies according to individual taste and reading ability, and theaters may order two prints of the most popular films, allowing moviegoers to chose between dubbing or subtitles. Animation and children's programming, however, is nearly universally dubbed, as in other regions.
Since the introduction of the DVD, some high budget films include the simultaneous option of both subtitles and/or dubbing. Often in such cases, the translations are made separately, rather than the subtitles being a verbatim transcript of the dubbed scenes of the film. While this allows for the smoothest possible flow of the subtitles, it can be frustrating for someone attempting to learn a foreign language.
In the traditional subtitling countries, dubbing is generally regarded as something very strange and unnatural and is only used for animated films and TV programs intended for pre-school children. As animated films are "dubbed" even in their original language and ambient noise and effects are usually recorded on a separate sound track, dubbing a low quality production into a second language produces little or no noticeable effect on the viewing experience. In dubbed live-action television or film, however, viewers are often distracted by the fact that the audio does not match the actors' lip movements. Furthermore, the dubbed voices may seem detached, inappropriate for the character, or overly expressive, and some ambient sounds may not be transferred to the dubbed track, creating a less enjoyable viewing experience.
Subtitling as a practice
In several countries or regions nearly all foreign language TV programs are subtitled, instead of dubbed, notably in:- AlbaniaAlbaniaAlbania , officially known as the Republic of Albania , is a country in Southeastern Europe, in the Balkans region. It is bordered by Montenegro to the northwest, Kosovo to the northeast, the Republic of Macedonia to the east and Greece to the south and southeast. It has a coast on the Adriatic Sea...
- ArgentinaArgentinaArgentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...
- Arab Middle East and North AfricaArab worldThe Arab world refers to Arabic-speaking states, territories and populations in North Africa, Western Asia and elsewhere.The standard definition of the Arab world comprises the 22 states and territories of the Arab League stretching from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Arabian Sea in the...
-- Modern Standard Arabic-language subtitling, used for foreign programming/cinema and often used when Arabic dialects are the primary medium of a film/TV program. Countries such as Lebanon, Algeria, and Morocco also often include French subtitling simultaneously. - AustraliaAustraliaAustralia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
(especially by SBSSpecial Broadcasting ServiceThe Special Broadcasting Service is a hybrid-funded Australian public broadcasting radio and television network. The stated purpose of SBS is "to provide multilingual and multicultural radio and television services that inform, educate and entertain all Australians and, in doing so, reflect...
) - BelgiumBelgiumBelgium , officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a federal state in Western Europe. It is a founding member of the European Union and hosts the EU's headquarters, and those of several other major international organisations such as NATO.Belgium is also a member of, or affiliated to, many...
(Subtitles in DutchDutch languageDutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...
in FlandersFlandersFlanders is the community of the Flemings but also one of the institutions in Belgium, and a geographical region located in parts of present-day Belgium, France and the Netherlands. "Flanders" can also refer to the northern part of Belgium that contains Brussels, Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp...
, dubbed into FrenchFrench languageFrench is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
in Wallonia, bilingual [Dutch-French] subtitles in Flemish movie theaters, dubbed versions in Wallonia. Children's shows and teleshopping are dubbed) - BoliviaBoliviaBolivia officially known as Plurinational State of Bolivia , is a landlocked country in central South America. It is the poorest country in South America...
- Bosnia and HerzegovinaBosnia and HerzegovinaBosnia and Herzegovina , sometimes called Bosnia-Herzegovina or simply Bosnia, is a country in Southern Europe, on the Balkan Peninsula. Bordered by Croatia to the north, west and south, Serbia to the east, and Montenegro to the southeast, Bosnia and Herzegovina is almost landlocked, except for the...
- BrazilBrazilBrazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...
(cable/satellite TV only) - BulgariaBulgariaBulgaria , officially the Republic of Bulgaria , is a parliamentary democracy within a unitary constitutional republic in Southeast Europe. The country borders Romania to the north, Serbia and Macedonia to the west, Greece and Turkey to the south, as well as the Black Sea to the east...
- ChileChileChile ,officially the Republic of Chile , is a country in South America occupying a long, narrow coastal strip between the Andes mountains to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. It borders Peru to the north, Bolivia to the northeast, Argentina to the east, and the Drake Passage in the far...
(cable/satellite TV only) - ColombiaColombiaColombia, officially the Republic of Colombia , is a unitary constitutional republic comprising thirty-two departments. The country is located in northwestern South America, bordered to the east by Venezuela and Brazil; to the south by Ecuador and Peru; to the north by the Caribbean Sea; to the...
(cable/satellite TV only) - CubaCubaThe Republic of Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city...
- Costa RicaCosta RicaCosta Rica , officially the Republic of Costa Rica is a multilingual, multiethnic and multicultural country in Central America, bordered by Nicaragua to the north, Panama to the southeast, the Pacific Ocean to the west and the Caribbean Sea to the east....
(cable/satellite TV, and on some national channels like Channel 7) - CroatiaCroatiaCroatia , officially the Republic of Croatia , is a unitary democratic parliamentary republic in Europe at the crossroads of the Mitteleuropa, the Balkans, and the Mediterranean. Its capital and largest city is Zagreb. The country is divided into 20 counties and the city of Zagreb. Croatia covers ...
(Subtitles in Croatian) - CyprusCyprusCyprus , officially the Republic of Cyprus , is a Eurasian island country, member of the European Union, in the Eastern Mediterranean, east of Greece, south of Turkey, west of Syria and north of Egypt. It is the third largest island in the Mediterranean Sea.The earliest known human activity on the...
- DenmarkDenmarkDenmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...
- EstoniaEstoniaEstonia , officially the Republic of Estonia , is a state in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland, to the west by the Baltic Sea, to the south by Latvia , and to the east by Lake Peipsi and the Russian Federation . Across the Baltic Sea lies...
- FinlandFinlandFinland , officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country situated in the Fennoscandian region of Northern Europe. It is bordered by Sweden in the west, Norway in the north and Russia in the east, while Estonia lies to its south across the Gulf of Finland.Around 5.4 million people reside...
(Subtitles in FinnishFinnish languageFinnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland Primarily for use by restaurant menus and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a...
or SwedishSwedish languageSwedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...
, Finland is bilingualLanguages of FinlandThe two “national” languages of Finland are Finnish and Swedish. The official minority languages are three Sami languages, Romani, Finnish Sign Language and the Karelian language.-Finnish:...
) - GreeceGreeceGreece , officially the Hellenic Republic , and historically Hellas or the Republic of Greece in English, is a country in southeastern Europe....
(Subtitles in GreekGreek languageGreek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
) - Hong KongHong KongHong Kong is one of two Special Administrative Regions of the People's Republic of China , the other being Macau. A city-state situated on China's south coast and enclosed by the Pearl River Delta and South China Sea, it is renowned for its expansive skyline and deep natural harbour...
(Dubbing in Cantonese often happens, but subtitling is also common, since these foreign programs are often broadcast in multiple languages.) - IcelandIcelandIceland , described as the Republic of Iceland, is a Nordic and European island country in the North Atlantic Ocean, on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Iceland also refers to the main island of the country, which contains almost all the population and almost all the land area. The country has a population...
- IndonesiaIndonesiaIndonesia , officially the Republic of Indonesia , is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Indonesia is an archipelago comprising approximately 13,000 islands. It has 33 provinces with over 238 million people, and is the world's fourth most populous country. Indonesia is a republic, with an...
(Subtitles in IndonesianIndonesian languageIndonesian is the official language of Indonesia. Indonesian is a normative form of the Riau Islands dialect of Malay, an Austronesian language which has been used as a lingua franca in the Indonesian archipelago for centuries....
, some foreign movies have subtitles of more than one language) - IsraelIsraelThe State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
(Non-Hebrew television programmes and films are always translated into Hebrew with subtitles. Bilingual Hebrew/Arabic or Hebrew/Russian subtitling, showing translation into both languages simultaneously, is very common on public TV channels. Dubbing is restricted to programmes and films aimed at children below school age. As of 2008 the closed captioning industry in Israel is on the rise since a law has been approved, stating that all the Hebrew programmes of The Israeli Television must be subtitled for the hearing impaired. Moreover, in recent years it became a norm in other channels and broadcasting bodies in Israel.) - IrelandIrelandIreland is an island to the northwest of continental Europe. It is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island on Earth...
- JapanJapanJapan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
(live-action only) - MacedoniaRepublic of MacedoniaMacedonia , officially the Republic of Macedonia , is a country located in the central Balkan peninsula in Southeast Europe. It is one of the successor states of the former Yugoslavia, from which it declared independence in 1991...
- Malaysia (Subtitles in Malay for programming of various languages except anime or other certain programmes dubbed into Malay, as well as certain Malay-language live action programs to English. Also appearing for programming in Indonesian since 2006 except for local news reports with Indonesian people speaking. All movies on 35mm film subtitled in Malay and Simplified Chinese. Usually, animation and 3D movies are exempted from subtitling (though studios may choose to add subtitles at their discretion). Indian and Chinese movies usually have subtitles of more than one languages)
- MontenegroMontenegroMontenegro Montenegrin: Crna Gora Црна Гора , meaning "Black Mountain") is a country located in Southeastern Europe. It has a coast on the Adriatic Sea to the south-west and is bordered by Croatia to the west, Bosnia and Herzegovina to the northwest, Serbia to the northeast and Albania to the...
(Subtitles in Montenegrin) - MyanmarMyanmarBurma , officially the Republic of the Union of Myanmar , is a country in Southeast Asia. Burma is bordered by China on the northeast, Laos on the east, Thailand on the southeast, Bangladesh on the west, India on the northwest, the Bay of Bengal to the southwest, and the Andaman Sea on the south....
- The Netherlands (Subtitles in Dutch, children's shows are dubbed)
- NorwayNorwayNorway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...
(NorwegianNorwegian languageNorwegian is a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is the official language. Together with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional variants .These Scandinavian languages together with the Faroese language...
subtitles in all foreign programmes except children's shows) - PeruPeruPeru , officially the Republic of Peru , is a country in western South America. It is bordered on the north by Ecuador and Colombia, on the east by Brazil, on the southeast by Bolivia, on the south by Chile, and on the west by the Pacific Ocean....
(in AymaraAymara languageAymara is an Aymaran language spoken by the Aymara people of the Andes. It is one of only a handful of Native American languages with over three million speakers. Aymara, along with Quechua and Spanish, is an official language of Peru and Bolivia...
and QuechuaQuechua languagesQuechua is a Native South American language family and dialect cluster spoken primarily in the Andes of South America, derived from an original common ancestor language, Proto-Quechua. It is the most widely spoken language family of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, with a total of probably...
) - PortugalPortugalPortugal , officially the Portuguese Republic is a country situated in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe, and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the West and South and by Spain to the North and East. The Atlantic archipelagos of the...
- RomaniaRomaniaRomania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...
(the TV channels that show cartoons are dubbed - Cartoon NetworkCartoon NetworkCartoon Network is a name of television channels worldwide created by Turner Broadcasting which used to primarily show animated programming. The channel began broadcasting on October 1, 1992 in the United States....
, Disney ChannelDisney ChannelDisney Channel is an American basic cable and satellite television network, owned by the Disney-ABC Television Group division of The Walt Disney Company. It is under the direction of Disney-ABC Television Group President Anne Sweeney. The channel's headquarters is located on West Alameda Ave. in...
, MinimaxMinimaxMinimax is a decision rule used in decision theory, game theory, statistics and philosophy for minimizing the possible loss for a worst case scenario. Alternatively, it can be thought of as maximizing the minimum gain...
) - SerbiaSerbiaSerbia , officially the Republic of Serbia , is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeast Europe, covering the southern part of the Carpathian basin and the central part of the Balkans...
(Subtitles in Serbian language, some children's shows and teleshopping are dubbed) - SloveniaSloveniaSlovenia , officially the Republic of Slovenia , is a country in Central and Southeastern Europe touching the Alps and bordering the Mediterranean. Slovenia borders Italy to the west, Croatia to the south and east, Hungary to the northeast, and Austria to the north, and also has a small portion of...
- SingaporeSingaporeSingapore , officially the Republic of Singapore, is a Southeast Asian city-state off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, north of the equator. An island country made up of 63 islands, it is separated from Malaysia by the Straits of Johor to its north and from Indonesia's Riau Islands by the...
(Even though the official language of Singapore is English, and the indigenous language is Malay, many TV programmes have Chinese subtitles for the benefit of immigrants from China, now settled for many generations) - South AfricaSouth AfricaThe Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...
(from Afrikaans, SesothoSesotho languageThe Sotho language, also known as Sesotho, Southern Sotho, or Southern Sesotho, is a Bantu language spoken primarily in South Africa, where it is one of the 11 official languages, and in Lesotho, where it is the national language...
, XhosaXhosa languageXhosa is one of the official languages of South Africa. Xhosa is spoken by approximately 7.9 million people, or about 18% of the South African population. Like most Bantu languages, Xhosa is a tonal language, that is, the same sequence of consonants and vowels can have different meanings when said...
and ZuluZulu languageZulu is the language of the Zulu people with about 10 million speakers, the vast majority of whom live in South Africa. Zulu is the most widely spoken home language in South Africa as well as being understood by over 50% of the population...
into EnglishEnglish languageEnglish is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
) - South KoreaSouth KoreaThe Republic of Korea , , is a sovereign state in East Asia, located on the southern portion of the Korean Peninsula. It is neighbored by the People's Republic of China to the west, Japan to the east, North Korea to the north, and the East China Sea and Republic of China to the south...
(Subtitles in KoreanKorean languageKorean is the official language of the country Korea, in both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers worldwide. In the 15th century, a national writing...
) - SwedenSwedenSweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....
(Subtitles in SwedishSwedish languageSwedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...
, children's shows are exempted from subtitling) - TaiwanTaiwanTaiwan , also known, especially in the past, as Formosa , is the largest island of the same-named island group of East Asia in the western Pacific Ocean and located off the southeastern coast of mainland China. The island forms over 99% of the current territory of the Republic of China following...
(Mandarin subtitles appear on most shows and all news or live action broadcasts) - TurkeyTurkeyTurkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...
(Ethnical languages of the country in TRT 3TRT 3TRT 3 is a Turkish television station. It mostly broadcasting sport events.-Introduction:TRT 3 started test transmissions on October 2, 1989 as "3...
) - UkraineUkraineUkraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
(TV shows in Russian are often shown with UkrainianUkrainian languageUkrainian is a language of the East Slavic subgroup of the Slavic languages. It is the official state language of Ukraine. Written Ukrainian uses a variant of the Cyrillic alphabet....
subtitles) - United KingdomUnited KingdomThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
- UruguayUruguayUruguay ,officially the Oriental Republic of Uruguay,sometimes the Eastern Republic of Uruguay; ) is a country in the southeastern part of South America. It is home to some 3.5 million people, of whom 1.8 million live in the capital Montevideo and its metropolitan area...
(cable/satellite TV only) - VenezuelaVenezuelaVenezuela , officially called the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela , is a tropical country on the northern coast of South America. It borders Colombia to the west, Guyana to the east, and Brazil to the south...
(cable/satellite TV only)
It is also common that television services in minority languages subtitle their programmes in the dominating language as well. Examples include the Welsh
Welsh language
Welsh is a member of the Brythonic branch of the Celtic languages spoken natively in Wales, by some along the Welsh border in England, and in Y Wladfa...
S4C
S4C
S4C , currently branded as S4/C, is a Welsh television channel broadcast from the capital, Cardiff. The first television channel to be aimed specifically at a Welsh-speaking audience, it is the fifth oldest British television channel .The channel - initially broadcast on...
and Irish
Irish language
Irish , also known as Irish Gaelic, is a Goidelic language of the Indo-European language family, originating in Ireland and historically spoken by the Irish people. Irish is now spoken as a first language by a minority of Irish people, as well as being a second language of a larger proportion of...
TG4
TG4
TG4 is a public service broadcaster for Irish language speakers. The channel has been on-air since 31 October 1996 in the Republic of Ireland and since April 2005 in Northern Ireland....
who subtitle in English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
and the Swedish
Swedish language
Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...
FST5 in Finland who subtitle in the majority language Finnish
Finnish language
Finnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland Primarily for use by restaurant menus and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a...
.
In Wallonia (Belgium) films are usually dubbed, but sometimes they are played on two channels at the same time: one dubbed (on La Une) and the other subtitled (on La Deux), but this is no longer done as frequently due to low ratings.
In Australia, one FTA
Free-to-air
Free-to-air describes television and radio services broadcast in clear form, allowing any person with the appropriate receiving equipment to receive the signal and view or listen to the content without requiring a subscription or one-off fee...
network, SBS
Special Broadcasting Service
The Special Broadcasting Service is a hybrid-funded Australian public broadcasting radio and television network. The stated purpose of SBS is "to provide multilingual and multicultural radio and television services that inform, educate and entertain all Australians and, in doing so, reflect...
airs its foreign-language shows subtitled in English.
Categories
Subtitles in the same language on the same production can be in different categories:- Narrative This is the most common type of subtitle. Narrative subtitles are those in which spoken dialogue is displayed. These are most commonly used to translate a film with one spoken language and the text of a second language.
- Forced These are common on movies. Forced subtitles only provide subtitles when the characters speak a foreign or alien languageAlien languageAlien language is a generic term used to describe a possible language originating from a hypothetical alien species. The study of such a hypothetical language has been termed xenolinguistics, although alternative terminology such as exolinguistics has found its way into use through the medium of...
, or a sign, flag, or other text in a scene is not translated in the localization and dubbing process. In some cases, foreign dialogue may be left untranslated if the movie is meant to be seen from the point of view of a particular character who does not speak the language in question.
- Content Content subtitles are a North American Secondary Industry (non-Hollywood, often low-budget) staple. They add content dictation that is missing from filmed action or dialogue. Due to the general low budget allowances in such films, it is often more feasible to add the overlay subtitles to fill in information. They appear most commonly seen on America's Maverick films as Forced Subtitles, and on Canada's MapleLeaf films as optional subtitles.
Content subtitles also appear in the beginning of some higher-budget films (e.g. Star WarsStar WarsStar Wars is an American epic space opera film series created by George Lucas. The first film in the series was originally released on May 25, 1977, under the title Star Wars, by 20th Century Fox, and became a worldwide pop culture phenomenon, followed by two sequels, released at three-year...
) or at the end of a film (e.g. Gods and GeneralsGods and Generals (film)Gods and Generals is a 2003 American film based on the novel Gods and Generals by Jeffrey Shaara. It depicts events that take place prior to those shown in the 1993 film Gettysburg, which was based on The Killer Angels, a novel by Shaara's father, Michael...
)
- Titles only Dubbed programs use this sort of subtitle. Titles only provide only the text for any untranslated on-screen text. They are most commonly forced (see above).
- Bonus Bonus subtitles are an additional set of text blurbs that are added to DVDs. They are similar to Blu-ray DiscBlu-ray DiscBlu-ray Disc is an optical disc storage medium designed to supersede the DVD format. The plastic disc is 120 mm in diameter and 1.2 mm thick, the same size as DVDs and CDs. Blu-ray Discs contain 25 GB per layer, with dual layer discs being the norm for feature-length video discs...
s' in-movie content or to the "info nuggets" in VH1 Pop-up VideoPop-up VideoPop Up Video is a VH1 television show that "pops up" bubbles — officially called "info nuggets" — containing trivia, witticisms and borderline sexual innuendos throughout music videos. The show was created by Woody Thompson and Tad Low and premiered October 27, 1996. For a time, it was the...
. Often shown in popup or balloon form, they point out humorous blunders in the filming or background/behind-the-scenes information to what is appearing on screen.
- Localized Localized subtitles are a separate subtitle track that uses expanded references (i.e. "The sake [a Japanese Wine] was excellent as was the Wasabi") or can replace the standardized subtitle track with a localized form replacing references to local custom (i.e. from above, "The wine was excellent as was the spicy dip").
- Extended/Expanded Extended subtitles combine the standard subtitle track with the localization subtitle track. Originally found only on Celestial DVDs in the early 2000s, the format has expanded to many export-intended releases from China, Japan, India and Taiwan. The term "Expanded Subtitle" is owned by Celestial, with Extended being used by other companies.
Types
Subtitles exist in two forms; open subtitles are 'open to all' and cannot be turned off by the viewer; closed subtitles are designed for a certain group of viewers, and can usually be turned on/off or selected by the viewer - examples being teletext pages, US Closed captions (608/708), DVB Bitmap subtitles, DVD/Blu-ray subtitles.While distributing content, subtitles can appear in one of 3 types:
- Hard (also known as hardsubs or open subtitles). The subtitle text is irreversibly merged in original video frames, and so no special equipment or software is required for playback. Hence, very complex transition effects and animation can be implemented, such as karaokeKaraokeis a form of interactive entertainment or video game in which amateur singers sing along with recorded music using a microphone and public address system. The music is typically a well-known pop song minus the lead vocal. Lyrics are usually displayed on a video screen, along with a moving symbol,...
song lyrics using various colors, fonts, sizes, animation (like a bouncing ball) etc. to follow the lyrics. However, these subtitles cannot be turned off unless the original video is also included in the distribution as they are now part of the original frame, and thus it is impossible to have several variants of subtitling, such as in multiple languages.
- Prerendered (also known as closed) subtitles are separate video frames that are overlaid on the original video stream while playing. Prerendered subtitles are used on DVDDVDA DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
and Blu-ray (though they are contained in the same file as the video stream). It is possible to turn them off or have multiple language subtitles and switch among them, but the player has to support such subtitles to display them. Also, subtitles are usually encoded as images with minimal bitrate and number of colors; they usually lack anti-aliasedAnti-aliasingIn digital signal processing, spatial anti-aliasing is the technique of minimizing the distortion artifacts known as aliasing when representing a high-resolution image at a lower resolution...
font rasterizationFont rasterizationFont rasterization is the process of converting text from a vector description to a raster or bitmap description. This often involves some anti-aliasing on screen text to make it smoother and easier to read...
. Also, changing such subtitles is hard, but special OCROptical character recognitionOptical character recognition, usually abbreviated to OCR, is the mechanical or electronic translation of scanned images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text into machine-encoded text. It is widely used to convert books and documents into electronic files, to computerize a record-keeping...
software, such as SubRipSubRipSubRip is a software program for Windows which "rips" subtitles and their timings from video. It is free software, released under the GNU GPL...
exists to convert such subtitles to "soft" ones.
- Soft (also known as softsubs or closed subtitles) are separate instructions, usually a specially marked up text with time stamps to be displayed during playback. It requires player support and, moreover, there are multiple incompatible (but usually reciprocally convertible) subtitle file formats. Softsubs are relatively easy to create and change, and thus are frequently used for fansubFansubA fansub is a version of a foreign film or foreign television program which has been translated by fans and subtitled into a language other than that of the original.-History:...
s. Text rendering quality can vary depending on the player, but is generally higher than prerendered subtitles. Also, some formats introduce text encoding troubles for the end-user, especially if very different languages are used simultaneously (for example, Latin and Asian scripts).
In other categorization, digital video subtitles are sometimes called internal, if they are embedded in a single video file container along with video and audio streams, and external if they are distributed as separate file (that is less convenient, but it is easier to edit/change such file).
| Feature | Hard | Prerendered | Soft |
|---|---|---|---|
| Can be turned off/on | |||
| Multiple subtitle variants (for example, languages) | , though all displayed at the same time | ||
| Editable | Difficult, but possible | ||
| Player requirements | None | Majority of players support DVD subtitles | Usually requires installation of special software, unless national regulators mandate its distribution |
| Visual appearance, colors, font quality | Low to High, depends on video resolution/compression | Low | Low to High, depends on player and subtitle file format |
| Transitions, karaoke and other special effects | Highest | Low | Depends on player and subtitle file format, but generally poor |
| Distribution | Inside original video | Separate low-bitrate video stream, commonly multiplexed | Relatively small subtitle file or instructions stream, multiplexed or separate |
| Additional overhead | None, though subtitles added by re-encoding of the original video may degrade overall image quality, and the sharp edges of text may introduce artifact Compression artifact A compression artifact is a noticeable distortion of media caused by the application of lossy data compression.... s in surrounding video |
High | Low |
For software video players
| Name | Extension | Type | Text Styling | Metadata | Timings | Timing Precision |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AQTitle | .aqt | Text | Framings | Dependent on Frame Film frame In filmmaking, video production, animation, and related fields, a film frame or video frame is one of the many still images which compose the complete moving picture... |
||
| JACOSub http://unicorn.us.com/jacosub/jscripts.html | .jss | Text | Elapsed Time | 10 Milliseconds | ||
| MicroDVD MicroDVD MicroDVD is a subtitle file format for digital video. Its name is derived from a media player application designed to play DVD videos along with subtitles, originally developed by Tiamat Software. The application was first released in 2000 but development ended in 2001... |
.sub | Text | Framings | Dependent on Frame | ||
| MPEG-4 Timed Text MPEG-4 Part 17 MPEG-4 Part 17, or MPEG-4 Timed Text, or MPEG-4 Streaming text format is the text based subtitle format for MPEG-4, published as ISO/IEC 14496-17 in 2006... |
.ttxt (or mixed with A/V stream) | XML XML Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards.... |
Elapsed Time | 1 Millisecond | ||
| MPSub MPlayer MPlayer is a free and open source media player. The program is available for all major operating systems, including Linux and other Unix-like systems, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. Versions for OS/2, Syllable, AmigaOS and MorphOS are also available. The Windows version works, with some minor... |
.sub | Text | Sequential Time | 10 Milliseconds | ||
| Ogg Writ Ogg Writ Ogg Writ is a text-phrase codec used with the Ogg encapsulation format.It was initially designed to provide subtitles for Ogg Theora videos, but is also useful for song lyrics with Ogg FLAC or Vorbis, transcripts with Ogg Speex, or any other place where it is useful to combine text with audio or... |
N/A (mixed with audio/video stream) | Text | Sequential Granules | Dependent on Bitstream Bitstream A bitstream or bit stream is a time series of bits.A bytestream is a series of bytes, typically of 8 bits each, and can be regarded as a special case of a bitstream.... |
||
| Phoenix Subtitle | .pjs | Text | Framings | Dependent on Frame | ||
| PowerDivX | .psb | Text | Elapsed Time | 1 Second | ||
| RealText http://service.real.com/help/library/guides/realtext/realtext.htm | .rt | HTML HTML HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages.... |
Elapsed Time | 10 Milliseconds | ||
| SAMI SAMI SAMI is a Microsoft accessibility initiative released in 1998. The structured markup language is designed to simplify creating captions for media playback on a PC, i.e. not for broadcast purposes.... |
.smi | HTML | Framings | Dependent on Frame | ||
| Structured Subtitle Format | .ssf | XML | Elapsed Time | 1 Millisecond | ||
| SubRip SubRip SubRip is a software program for Windows which "rips" subtitles and their timings from video. It is free software, released under the GNU GPL... |
.srt | Text | Elapsed Time | 1 Millisecond | ||
| Gloss Subtitle | .gsub | HTML/XML | Elapsed Time | 10 Milliseconds | ||
| (Advanced) SubStation Alpha SubStation Alpha SubStation Alpha , abbreviated SSA, is a subtitle file format created by CS Low that allows for more advanced subtitles than the conventional SRT and similar formats. This format can be rendered with VSFilter in conjunction with a DirectShow-aware video player , or MPlayer with the SSA/ASS library... |
.ssa or .ass (advanced) | Text | Elapsed Time | 10 Milliseconds | ||
| SubViewer SubViewer SubViewer is a utility for adding and synchronizing subtitles to video content. It was created by David Dolinski in 1999, and offered for download on his personal website, . A friend of David Dolinski created, at the same time, software to extract subtitles from DVD named SubRip.SubViewer became... |
.sub | Text | Elapsed Time | 10 Milliseconds | ||
| Universal Subtitle Format Universal Subtitle Format Universal Subtitle Format is a CoreCodec project to create a clean, documented, powerful and easy to use subtitle file format. It is based on XML for some of the following reasons: flexibility, unicode support, a hierarchical system, and ease of administration.USF subtitles are usually used in... |
.usf | XML | Elapsed Time | 1 Millisecond | ||
| VobSub VSFilter DirectVobSub formerly known as VSFilter is a software add-on for Microsoft Windows that is able to read external subtitle files and superimposes them on a playing video file.... |
.sub + .idx | Image | N/A | N/A | Elapsed Time | 1 Millisecond |
| XSUB | N/A (embedded in .divx container) | Image | N/A | N/A | Elapsed Time | 1 Millisecond |
| Spruce subtitle format http://web.archive.org/web/20091028173024/http://geocities.com/McPoodle43/DVDMaestro/stl_format.html | .stl | Text | Sequential Time+Frames | Sequential Time+Frames | ||
There are still many more uncommon formats. Most of them are text-based and have the extension .txt.
For media
For cinema movies shown in a theatre:- CinemaFilmA film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...
- D-CinemaDigital cinemaDigital cinema refers to the use of digital technology to distribute and project motion pictures. A movie can be distributed via hard drives, optical disks or satellite and projected using a digital projector instead of a conventional film projector...
: digital projection of movie in DCPDigital Cinema PackageA Digital Cinema Package is a collection of digital files used to store and convey Digital cinema audio, image, and data streams.The term has been defined by Digital Cinema Initiatives, LLC in their recommendations for packaging of DC contents...
format
For movies on DVD Video:
- DVD-VideoDVD-VideoDVD-Video is a consumer video format used to store digital video on DVD discs, and is currently the dominant consumer video format in Asia, North America, Europe, and Australia. Discs using the DVD-Video specification require a DVD drive and a MPEG-2 decoder...
subtitles - Blu-ray DiscBlu-ray DiscBlu-ray Disc is an optical disc storage medium designed to supersede the DVD format. The plastic disc is 120 mm in diameter and 1.2 mm thick, the same size as DVDs and CDs. Blu-ray Discs contain 25 GB per layer, with dual layer discs being the norm for feature-length video discs...
subtitles
For TV broadcast:
- TeletextTeletextTeletext is a television information retrieval service developed in the United Kingdom in the early 1970s. It offers a range of text-based information, typically including national, international and sporting news, weather and TV schedules...
- DVB Subtitles
- Philips Overlay Graphics Text
- ImitextImitextImitext is a bitmap subtitle transmission technique proprietary to Screen Subtitling Systems. The technology has been licensed to Scientific Atlanta for incorporation into their PowerVu encoders and decoders....
Subtitles created for TV broadcast are stored in a variety of file formats. The majority of these formats are proprietary to the vendors of subtitle insertion systems.
Broadcast subtitle formats include:
.XIF
.X32
.PAC
.RAC
.CHK
.AYA
.890
.CIP
.CAP
.ULT
.USF
.CIN
.L32
.ST4
.ST7
.TIT
.STL
The EBU format defined by Technical Reference 3264-E is an 'open' format intended for subtitle exchange between broadcasters. Files in this format have the extension .stl (not to be mixed up with text "Spruce subtitle format" mentioned above, which also has extension .stl)
For internet delivery:
- SMILSynchronized Multimedia Integration LanguageSMIL , the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language, is a W3C recommended XML markup language for describing multimedia presentations. It defines markup for timing, layout, animations, visual transitions, and media embedding, among other things...
- Timed TextTimed TextTimed Text refers to the presentation of text media in synchrony with other media, such as audio and video.Typical applications of timed text are the real time subtitling of foreign-language movies on the Web, captioning for people lacking audio devices or having hearing impairments, karaoke,...
DFXP
The Timed Text format currently a "Candidate Recommendation" of the W3C (called DFXP) is also proposed as an 'open' format for subtitle exchange and distribution to media players, such as Microsoft Silverlight.
Reasons for not subtitling a foreign language
Most times, a foreign language is spoken in film, subtitles are used to translate the dialogue for the viewer. However, there are occasions when foreign dialogue is left unsubtitled (and thus incomprehensible to most of the target audience). This is often done if the movie is seen predominantly from the viewpoint of a particular character who does not speak the language. Such absence of subtitles allows the audience to feel a similar sense of incomprehension and alienation that the character feels. An example of this is seen in Not Without My DaughterNot Without My Daughter
Not Without My Daughter is a film released in 1991 depicting the escape of American citizen Betty Mahmoody and her daughter from her husband in Iran. The film was shot in the United States and Israel, and the main characters are played by Sally Field and Alfred Molina...
. The Persian language
Persian language
Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...
dialogue spoken by the Iranian characters is not subtitled because the main character Betty Mahmoody does not speak Persian and the audience is seeing the film from her viewpoint.
Subtitles as a source of humor
Occasionally, movies will use subtitles as a source of humor, parody and satire.- In Annie HallAnnie HallAnnie Hall is a 1977 American romantic comedy directed by Woody Allen from a screenplay co-written with Marshall Brickman and co-starring Diane Keaton. One of Allen's most popular and most honored films, it won four Academy Awards including Best Picture...
the characters of Woody AllenWoody AllenWoody Allen is an American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, jazz musician, author, and playwright. Allen's films draw heavily on literature, sexuality, philosophy, psychology, Jewish identity, and the history of cinema...
and Diane KeatonDiane KeatonDiane Keaton is an American film actress, director, producer, and screenwriter. Keaton began her career on stage, and made her screen debut in 1970...
are having a conversation; their real thoughts are shown in subtitles. - In Austin Powers in GoldmemberAustin Powers in GoldmemberAustin Powers in Goldmember is a 2002 American spy comedy film and the third installment of the Austin Powers series starring Mike Myers in the title role. The movie was directed by Jay Roach, and co-written by Mike Myers and Michael McCullers. Myers also plays the roles of Dr. Evil, Goldmember,...
, JapaneseJapanese languageis a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
dialog is subtitled using white type that blends in with white objects in the background. An example is when white binders turn the subtitle "I have a huge rodent problem" into "I have a huge rod." After many cases of this, Mr. Roboto says "Why don't I just speak English?", in English. In the same film, Austin and Nigel Powers directly speak in Cockney English to make the content of their conversation unintelligible; subtitles appear for the first part of the conversation, but then cease and are replaced with a series of question marks. - In Yellow Submarine, the Beatles use the subtitles of All you need is loveAll You Need Is Love"All You Need Is Love" is a song written by John Lennon and credited to Lennon–McCartney. It was first performed by The Beatles on Our World, the first live global television link. Watched by 400 million in 26 countries, the programme was broadcast via satellite on 25 June 1967...
to defeat a giant glove. - In The ImpostorsThe ImpostorsThe Impostors is a 1998 farce motion picture written and directed by Stanley Tucci, starring Oliver Platt, Stanley Tucci, Alfred Molina, Tony Shalhoub, Steve Buscemi, and Billy Connolly....
one character speaks in a foreign language, while another character hides under the bed. Although the hidden character cannot understand what is being spoken, he can read the subtitles. Since the subtitles are overlaid on the film, they appear to be reversed from his point of view. His attempt to puzzle out these subtitles enhances the humor of the scene. - The movie Airplane!Airplane!Airplane! is a 1980 American satirical comedy film directed and written by David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker and released by Paramount Pictures...
and its sequel feature two inner-city African Americans speaking in heavily accented slang, which another character refers to as if it were a foreign language: "JiveAfrican American Vernacular EnglishAfrican American Vernacular English —also called African American English; less precisely Black English, Black Vernacular, Black English Vernacular , or Black Vernacular English —is an African American variety of American English...
". Subtitles translate their speech, which is full of colorful expressions and mild profanity, into bland standard EnglishStandard EnglishStandard English refers to whatever form of the English language is accepted as a national norm in an Anglophone country...
, but the typical viewer can understand enough of what they are saying to recognize the incongruity. Transcript of the dialog - in Cars 2Cars 2Cars 2 is a 2011 American computer-animated action film produced by Pixar, and it is the sequel to the 2006 film, Cars. In the film, race car Lightning McQueen and tow truck Mater head to Japan and Europe to compete in the World Grand Prix, but Mater becomes sidetracked with international espionage...
- Scene 1: Susie Chef and Mater Speaks Chinese with English Subtitles and Luigi, Mama Lopolino and Uncle Topolino speaks the Languages with English Subtitles.
- In the Carl ReinerCarl ReinerCarl Reiner is an American actor, film director, producer, writer and comedian. He has won nine Emmy Awards and one Grammy Award during this career...
comedy The Man with Two BrainsThe Man with Two BrainsThe Man with Two Brains is a 1983 American science fiction comedy film directed by Carl Reiner and starring Steve Martin and Kathleen Turner....
, after stopping Dr. Michael Hfuhruhurr (Steve MartinSteve MartinStephen Glenn "Steve" Martin is an American actor, comedian, writer, playwright, producer, musician and composer....
) for speeding, a German police officer realizes that Hfuhruhurr can speak English. He asks his colleague in their squad car to turn off the subtitles, and indicates toward the bottom of the screen, commenting that "This is better — we have more room down there now". - In the opening credits of Monty Python and the Holy GrailMonty Python and the Holy GrailMonty Python and the Holy Grail is a 1974 British comedy film written and performed by the comedy group Monty Python , and directed by Gilliam and Jones...
the Swedish subtitler switches to English and promotes his country, until the introduction is cut off and the subtitler "sacked". In the DVD version of the same film, the viewer could choose, instead of hearing aid and local languages, lines from ShakespeareWilliam ShakespeareWilliam Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
's Henry IV, part 2Henry IV, Part 2Henry IV, Part 2 is a history play by William Shakespeare, believed written between 1596 and 1599. It is the third part of a tetralogy, preceded by Richard II and Henry IV, Part 1 and succeeded by Henry V.-Sources:...
that vaguely resemble the lines that are actually being spoken in film, if they are "people who hate the film". - In Scary Movie 4Scary Movie 4Scary Movie 4 is the fourth film of the Scary Movie franchise, directed by David Zucker, written by Jim Abrahams, Craig Mazin and Pat Proft, and produced by Craig Mazin and Robert K. Weiss. It is distributed by The Weinstein Company via its Dimension Films unit in the U.S. and Television, and...
, there is a scene where the actors speak in faux JapaneseJapanese languageis a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
(nonsensical words which mostly consist of Japanese company names), but the content of the subtitles is the "real" conversation. - In Not Another Teen MovieNot Another Teen MovieNot Another Teen Movie is a 2001 American comedy film directed by Joel Gallen, released on December 14, 2001 by Columbia Pictures. It is a parody of teen movies which have accumulated in Hollywood over the last few decades...
the nude foreign exchange student character Areola speaks lightly accented English, but her dialog is subtitled anyway. Also, the text is spaced in such a way that a view of her bare breasts is unhindered. - In TrainspottingTrainspotting (film)Trainspotting is a 1996 British satirical/drama film directed by Danny Boyle based on the novel of the same name by Irvine Welsh. The movie follows a group of heroin addicts in a late 1980s economically depressed area of Edinburgh and their passage through life...
the leading characters have a conversation in a crowded club. To understand what is being said, the entire dialog is subtitled. - Simon EllisSimon EllisSimon Ellis is a musical director who has worked with Britney Spears, S Club 7 and East 17.-External links:**...
' 2000 short film Telling Lies juxtaposes a soundtrack of a man telling lies on the telephone against subtitles which expose the truth. http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/filmnetwork/A7079510 - AnimutationAnimutationAnimutation or fanimutation is a form of web-based computer animation, typically created in Adobe Flash and characterized by unpredictable montages of pop-culture images set to music, often in a language foreign to the intended viewers...
s commonly use subtitles to present the comical "fake lyrics"MondegreenA mondegreen is the mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase as a result of near homophony, in a way that gives it a new meaning. It most commonly is applied to a line in a poem or a lyric in a song...
(English words that sound close to what is actually being sung in the song in the non-English language). These fake lyrics are a major staple of the Animutation genre. - Lock, Stock and Two Smoking BarrelsLock, Stock and Two Smoking BarrelsLock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is a 1998 British crime film directed and written by Guy Ritchie. The story is a heist film involving a self-confident young card sharp who loses £500,000 to a powerful crime lord in a rigged game of three card brag...
contains a scene spoken entirely in cockney rhyming slangCockney rhyming slangRhyming slang is a form of phrase construction in the English language and is especially prevalent in dialectal British English from the East End of London; hence the alternative name, Cockney rhyming slang...
that is subtitled in standard English. - In an episode of Angry Beavers, at one point Norbert begins to speak with such a heavy European accent that his words are subtitled on the bottom of the screen. Daggett actually touches the subtitles, shoving them out of the way.
- In the American theatrical versions of Night WatchNight Watch (2004 film)Night Watch is a 2004 Russian supernatural thriller film directed by Timur Bekmambetov. It is loosely based on the novel The Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko, and is the first part of a trilogy, followed by Day Watch and ending supposedly with Twilight Watch .-Plot:In the prologue, which...
and Day Watch, Russian dialogues are translated by subtitles which are designed accordingly to the depicted events. For instance, subtitles dissolve in water like blood, tremble along with a shaking floor or get cut by sword. - The film CrankCrank (film)Crank is a 2006 American comedy movie, written and directed by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, and starring Jason Statham, Amy Smart, Jose Pablo Cantillo, Efren Ramirez, and Dwight Yoakam...
contains a scene where Jason StathamJason StathamJason Statham born 12 September1967) is an English actor and former diver, known for his roles in the Guy Ritchie crime films Revolver, Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels...
's character understands an Asian character's line of dialogue from reading the on-screen subtitle. The subtitle is even in reverse when his character reads the line. Later, an exclamation made by another Asian character is subtitled, but both the spoken words and the subtitles are in Chinese. - In Fatal InstinctFatal InstinctFatal Instinct is a 1993 comedy film directed by Carl Reiner. It parodies the erotic thriller movie genre, which at the time had reached its commercial peak. The film stars Armand Assante as a lawyer and cop named Ned Ravine who has an affair with a woman named Lola Cain played by Sean Young...
, also directed by Carl ReinerCarl ReinerCarl Reiner is an American actor, film director, producer, writer and comedian. He has won nine Emmy Awards and one Grammy Award during this career...
, one scene involving two characters talking about their murder plan in Yiddish to prevent anyone from knowing about it, only to be foiled by a man on the bench reading the on-screen subtitles. - Ken LoachKen LoachKenneth "Ken" Loach is a Palme D'Or winning English film and television director.He is known for his naturalistic, social realist directing style and for his socialist beliefs, which are evident in his film treatment of social issues such as homelessness , labour rights and child abuse at the...
released the film Riff-RaffRiff-RaffRiff-Raff is a 1991 British film directed by Ken Loach, starring Robert Carlyle and Ricky Tomlinson . It won the 1991 European Film Award Best Picture award....
into American theatres with subtitles not only so people could understand the thick Scottish accents, but also to make fun of many Americans' need for them (mentioned in the theatrical trailer). Loach has continued this process with some of his other films. - In Bobby Lee's "Tae Do," a parodyParodyA parody , in current usage, is an imitative work created to mock, comment on, or trivialise an original work, its subject, author, style, or some other target, by means of humorous, satiric or ironic imitation...
of Korean dramas in a Mad TVMad TVMad TV may refer to:*MADtv, an American sketch comedy television series based on Mad magazine*Mad TV , a 1991 German television station management simulation game*MAD TV , a Greek music channel-See also:...
episode, the subtitles make more sense of the story than the Korean language being spoken. The subtitles are made to appear as though written by someone with a poor understanding of grammar and are often intentionally made longer than what they actually say in the drama. For example an actor says "Sarang" ("I love you"), but the subtitle is so long that it covers the whole screen. - In Dead Ringers (comedy)Dead Ringers (comedy)Dead Ringers is a UK radio and television comedy impressions broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and later BBC Two. The programme was devised by producer Bill Dare and developed with Jon Holmes, Andy Hurst and Simon Blackwell. It starred Jon Culshaw, Jan Ravens, Phil Cornwell, Kevin Connelly and Mark Perry...
, journalists interview a group of Afghan terrorists in English, but one of them gets subtitled and sees it. He gets mad because he takes as an insult the fact that he is the only one to gets subtitled. - In Mel BrooksMel BrooksMel Brooks is an American film director, screenwriter, composer, lyricist, comedian, actor and producer. He is best known as a creator of broad film farces and comic parodies. He began his career as a stand-up comic and as a writer for the early TV variety show Your Show of Shows...
film Men in TightsMen in tightsMen in tights can refer to:* Robin Hood: Men in Tights, 1993 spoof comedy directed by Mel Brooks.* Men in pantyhose, men who wear the pantyhose garment...
, the thoughts of Broomhilde's (Megan Cavanaugh) horse Farfelkugel are shown as subtitles when Broomhilde attempts to jump on saddle off balcony. As Farfelkugel shudders, the showtitles show "She must be kidding!" - In the television series Drawn TogetherDrawn TogetherDrawn Together is an American animated television series, which ran on Comedy Central from October 27, 2004 to November 14, 2007. The series was created by Dave Jeser and Matt Silverstein, and uses a sitcom format with a TV reality show setting...
, the character Ling-Ling can only be understood through English subtitles, as his dialogue is delivered in a nonexistent language referred to as "Japorean" by Abbey DiGregorio, the voice actress for the character. - In the television series Green AcresGreen AcresGreen Acres is an American television series starring Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor as a couple who move from New York City to a country farm...
episode “Lisa's Mudder Comes for a Visit” (season 5 episode 1), Lisa and her mother converse in Hungarian, with English Subtitles. First, Lisa looks down and corrects the subtitles, “No no no, I said you hadn't changed a bit! We have a lot of trouble here with subtitles.”, and they change. Mother's Japanese chauffeur asks “I begga pardon - I bringa bags inna house?” that elicits a gong sound and Japanese subtitles. This is followed by Mother’s great dane barking with the subtitles “I've seen better doghouses than this” with Lisa responding “We're not interested in what the dog says”, and the subtitles disappear. Later, the subtitles ask farmhand Eb if they will be needing any more subtitles for the episode. - In the UK television series "Top Gear", in episode 6 of Series 13, they purposely mistranslate the song sung by Carla BruniCarla BruniCarla Bruni-Sarkozy is an Italian-French songwriter, singer, actress, and former model...
, having her supposedly denouncing hatred towards the trio of presenters ("but mainly James MayJames MayJames Daniel May is an English television presenter, journalist and writer. He is best known for his role as co-presenter of the award-winning motoring programme Top Gear alongside Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond....
") for destroying what is claimed to be her own Morris MarinaMorris MarinaThe Morris Marina is a car which was manufactured by the Morris division of British Leyland in the UK throughout the 1970s, which was a period of great turbulence and difficulty for the British car industry. It was known in some markets as the Austin Marina, Leyland Marina, and Morris 1.7...
.
One unintentional source of humor in subtitles comes from illegal DVDs produced in non-English-speaking countries (esp. China). These DVDs often contain poorly-worded subtitle tracks, possibly produced by machine translation
Machine translation
Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates the use of computer software to translate text or speech from one natural language to another.On a basic...
, with humorous results. One of the better-known examples is a copy of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith is a 2005 American epic space opera film written and directed by George Lucas. It is the sixth and final film released in the Star Wars saga and the third in terms of the series' internal chronology....
whose opening title was subtitled, "Star war: The backstroke of the west". http://winterson.com/2005/06/episode-iii-backstroke-of-west.html
See also
- AirscriptAirscriptAirScript is a hand-held device which provides theatregoers with subtitles in a variety of languages. The device was launched in November 2009 at the musical Hairspray at London's Shaftesbury Theatre. The first languages available were English, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Russian....
- Comparison of software video players with subtitle support
- DubbingDubbing (filmmaking)Dubbing is the post-production process of recording and replacing voices on a motion picture or television soundtrack subsequent to the original shooting. The term most commonly refers to the substitution of the voices of the actors shown on the screen by those of different performers, who may be...
- DubtitleDubtitleDubtitle is a term for a show recorded in which the subtitles are merely transcriptions of the new alternative dialogue spoken on the dubbed soundtrack rather than a translation of the original dialogue and was popularized by anime and kung fu film fans to refer to this practice....
- KaraokeKaraokeis a form of interactive entertainment or video game in which amateur singers sing along with recorded music using a microphone and public address system. The music is typically a well-known pop song minus the lead vocal. Lyrics are usually displayed on a video screen, along with a moving symbol,...
- Language customization
- Subtitle editorSubtitle editorA Subtitle editor is a type of software used to create and edit subtitles to be superimposed over, and synchronized with, video. Such editors usually provide video preview, easy entering/editing of text, start, and end times, and control over text formatting and positioning...
- Supertitle
- Surtitle
- Same Language SubtitlingSame language subtitlingSame language subtitling refers to the practice of subtitling programs on TV in the same language as the audio. This method of subtitling is used by national television broadcasters in India such as Doordarshan...
- Synchronized Multimedia Integration LanguageSynchronized Multimedia Integration LanguageSMIL , the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language, is a W3C recommended XML markup language for describing multimedia presentations. It defines markup for timing, layout, animations, visual transitions, and media embedding, among other things...
- Transcription (linguistics)Transcription (linguistics)Transcription in the linguistic sense is the systematic representation of language in written form. The source can either be utterances or preexisting text in another writing system, although some linguists only consider the former as transcription.Transcription should not be confused with...
External links
- Your Local Cinema - subtitled listings & information (UK)
- Popularity of subtitles among those with unimpaired hearing
- ESIST Code of Good Subtitling Practice
- Proposed set of subtitling standards in Europe
- How To Add Subtitles With DivXland
- A semiolinguistic study of concise writing and subtitling - in French
- community subtitles
- Automatic subtitles
- Open source subtitles