Subtitles

Although naming conventions can vary, captions are subtitles that include written descriptions of other elements of the audio, like music or sound effects.

Professional subtitlers usually work with specialized computer software and hardware where the video is digitally stored on a hard disk, making each frame instantly accessible.

For example, on YouTube, automatic captions are available in Arabic, Bengali, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.

These are a transcription rather than a translation, and usually also contain lyrics and descriptions of important non-dialogue audio such as (SIGHS), (WIND HOWLING), ("SONG TITLE" PLAYING), (KISSES), (THUNDER RUMBLING), (LAUGHTER), (PANTING), (CAT YOWLS), (GLASS SHATTERS) and (DOOR CREAKING).

[5][clarification needed] 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.

They must therefore develop techniques for keying homophones differently, and be unswayed by the pressures of delivering accurate product on immediate demand.

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.

[5] News captioning applications currently available are designed to accept text from a variety of inputs: stenography, Velotype, QWERTY, ASCII import, and the newsroom computer.

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.

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.

[9] It refers to regular subtitles in the original language where important non-dialogue information has been added, as well as speaker identification, which may be useful when the viewer cannot otherwise visually tell who is saying what.

Closed captioning is falling out of favor as many users have no difficulty reading SDH subtitles, which are text with contrast outline.

Judge Stephen Victor Wilson dismissed the suit in September 2016, ruling that allegations of civil rights violations did not present evidence of intentional discrimination against viewers with disabilities, and that allegations over misrepresenting the extent of subtitles "fall far short of demonstrating that reasonable consumers would actually be deceived as to the amount of subtitled content provided, as there are no representations whatsoever that all song lyrics would be captioned, or even that the content would be 'fully' captioned.

Subtitles allow viewers to understand dialogue that is poorly enunciated, delivered quietly, in unfamiliar dialects, or spoken by background characters.

[14][15][16] Same language subtitling (SLS) is the use of synchronized captioning of musical lyrics (or any text with an audio or 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.

[17][18] Studies (including those by the University of Nottingham and the What Works Clearinghouse of the United States Department of Education) have found that use of subtitles can help promote reading comprehension in school-aged children.

[citation needed][20][22] In some Asian television programming, captioning is considered a part of the genre, and has evolved beyond simply capturing what is being said.

In a bid to reach the largest audience possible, Shaw had already recorded his films in Mandarin, reasoning it would be most universal variety of Chinese.

It is not only the quickest and cheapest method of translating content, but is also usually preferred as it is possible for the audience to hear the original dialogue and voices of the actors.

The unavoidable delay, typing errors, lack of editing, and high cost mean that real-time translation subtitling is in low demand.

For example, for many of its films and television programs, PBS displays standard captions representing speech from 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".

With the arrival of sound film, the film importers in Germany, Italy, France, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Austria, San Marino, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Slovakia, Hungary, Belarus, Andorra, Spain, Canada, New Zealand, Ireland, United States and United Kingdom decided to dub the foreign voices, while the rest of Europe elected to display the dialogue as translated subtitles.

The choice was largely due to financial reasons (subtitling is more economical and quicker than dubbing), 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.

In many Latin American countries, local network television will show dubbed versions of English-language programs and movies, while cable stations (often international) more commonly broadcast subtitled material.

Since the introduction of the DVD and, later, the Blu-ray Disc, some high budget films include the simultaneous option of both subtitles and dubbing.

In the traditional subtitling countries, dubbing is generally regarded as something strange and unnatural and is only used for animated films and TV programs intended for pre-school children.

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.

These DVDs often contain poorly worded subtitle tracks, possibly produced by machine translation, with humorous results.