{"id":1512,"date":"2022-02-28T09:40:30","date_gmt":"2022-02-28T08:40:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/?p=1512"},"modified":"2022-02-28T09:40:30","modified_gmt":"2022-02-28T08:40:30","slug":"a-picture-is-worth-a-thousand-subtitles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/?p=1512&lang=en","title":{"rendered":"A picture is worth a thousand subtitles"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>By<\/em> <em>Richard Peters<\/em><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s like a dream come true!<\/p>\n<p>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 \u2013 which not only looked exotic but sounded it \u2013 were the ones I enjoyed the most.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019ll be lucky to make heads or tails of the story unfolding before me, but with them, I\u2019m 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 \u2013 even when the dialogue is in a language I speak myself, and even when the subtitles are in a language I don\u2019t! But for those who do have the ability to balance the reading and the viewing, there\u2019s still a risk of information overload if there\u2019s too much text and not enough time to read it.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019m working on a customer video \u2013 an interview, say, or a presentation of a new product \u2013 it\u2019s up to me to make sure that the viewer isn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019 brains with text when they\u2019re trying to digest the visuals? And there\u2019s 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\u2019m \u201cjust\u201d translating written text for readers who have no time constraints and no other content vying for their attention.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s well worth the effort, because bad subtitles are at best amusing and at worst frustrating \u2013 as anyone who\u2019s had to wrestle with the misheard, misspelled, automated captions for a YouTube video will appreciate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When you\u2019re watching a film in a foreign language, it\u2019s the subtitles that save you from being utterly lost. But what\u2019s the secret behind good subtitling?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1514,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[629,504,630,501,631],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1512"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1512"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1512\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1513,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1512\/revisions\/1513"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1514"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kleinwolfpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}