A picture is worth a thousand subtitles

By Richard Peters

 

For as long as I can remember, subtitles have seemed to me to be full of promise: a gateway to exotic worlds full of strange-sounding words and unfamiliar images. And now that I get to work on them as part of my job, it’s like a dream come true!

Growing up in London, I recall watching foreign films on the telly of an evening with my parents. Usually these would have been dubbed into English, but occasionally they would sport subtitles instead; presumably because the prospective audience was too small to justify hiring a whole cast of voice actors. Those rarer films – which not only looked exotic but sounded it – were the ones I enjoyed the most.

Of course, not speaking the language myself, I relied on the captions to tell me what was being said. And I soon understood that subtitles are a double-edged sword: without them, I’ll be lucky to make heads or tails of the story unfolding before me, but with them, I’m chained to the bottom 20 percent of my television screen. Now, some of this may have to do with my own idiosyncrasies: whenever I see a film that has been subtitled, my eyes are drawn so entirely to the words that I forget to look at the pictures – even when the dialogue is in a language I speak myself, and even when the subtitles are in a language I don’t! But for those who do have the ability to balance the reading and the viewing, there’s still a risk of information overload if there’s too much text and not enough time to read it.

These days, in my work as an editor and translator of corporate communications, I get to see subtitling in a whole new light. When I’m working on a customer video – an interview, say, or a presentation of a new product – it’s up to me to make sure that the viewer isn’t overwhelmed by the captions. One way we do this is to use subtitling software that lets us precisely control how the stream of words we add to existing footage appears.

Preparing effective subtitles is like translation, but with a pinch of interpreting: What do viewers most need to understand? What can safely be left out so as not to overload viewers’ brains with text when they’re trying to digest the visuals? And there’s a dash of typesetting in there, too: How will the placement of words, their font, their size, their colour help or hinder the uptake of their message? Not to mention the timing, which almost makes me feel like a music producer: How long must written words be visible for them to be intelligible? How quickly can I move on to the next spoken sentence? How can I make it clear that someone new is speaking? There are so many more plates to keep spinning than when I’m “just” translating written text for readers who have no time constraints and no other content vying for their attention.

Good subtitles can add immense value to any kind of moving image. But crafting good ones takes time. In a corporate context, when a film is supposed to engage stakeholders or entice customers, it’s well worth the effort, because bad subtitles are at best amusing and at worst frustrating – as anyone who’s had to wrestle with the misheard, misspelled, automated captions for a YouTube video will appreciate.