hello and welcome to this class subtitling basics I'm dr. jolly here at Missouri State University thanks for joining me this is going to be a very brief presentation on just the basics of subtitling videos so let's get started so we know that in today's day and age we're seeing a lot more screens and that means that the demand for subtitles is higher than ever if we look around our daily lives we're at the airport we look up at CNN monitor we see the closed caption or we might watch a television show and turn on the closed captioning right we see this grains on the on the airplanes or we turn on Netflix and we start streaming something and maybe the captions come on and if you're just browsing social media like Facebook or Instagram or one of those services you'll also notice that most of the video content is captioned and that's for a very good reason studies show that up to 85 percent of people or all videos viewed on Facebook are viewed with the sound off so we sort of take these captions for granted but they're popping up all over the place most video content these days is captioned or has subtitles translated captions and one thing that I wanted to mention is that although a couple of the examples on the screen are examples of closed captions that were originated to assist the deaf and the hearing impaired that's not the case anymore like I said almost all video content is captioned so let's talk briefly about the different types of captions and subtitles there used to be a big distinction between closed captions open captions subtitles sing same language subtitles these distinctions are kind of sort of melting away and we just talked about captions and sometimes subtitles if they're translated but originally in about the 1970s when concerns started to sort of build for how do we help give access to the deaf and the hearing impaired closed captions emerged so these were captions that appeared on the screen that were originally designed for the deaf or the hearing impaired now if you've ever seen closed captions and I'm sure all of you have you'll notice that they usually contain sometimes in parentheses or brackets descriptions of all the sounds so it might say something like you know ominous music playing in parentheses or in brackets or crash from the kitchen or something a description of sound and again that is for the benefit of the deaf or the hearing impaired so you're you're getting the Tran the transcription I should say of the language but also the description of different sounds that's typical of closed captions because they were designed for the deaf and hearing-impaired another thing the reason they're called closed captions as opposed to open captions is because you can turn them on or off using the settings on your device so for example on your television or on your iPad or other tablet or telephone if you can turn these captions on or off technically they are closed captions now these types of captions can be done either in post-production after a video or a television or movie has already been produced or they can also be like you'll often see on the evening news or a live sports event they can happen in real time and those are called real-time or online captions and those are done with a stenographer and the aid of some computer software so they happen in real time open captions these are captions that cannot be turned on or off so lots of times when you're watching a video so a video might pop up on your Facebook feed and it has captions that you don't have any access to they're basically burned on to the image right there part of the video image that you're seeing you can't turn them on or off that's done on purpose because as I mentioned earlier producers of video content for social media know that most people will view the video with the sound turned way down or off and so they build that caption onto they layer it onto the video and they freeze it or burn it into place so the fact that you can't turn it on or off is what makes it an open caption and then finally subtitles write subtitles they have same length there's such a thing as same language subtitles that's when the dialogue or the narration of the video is transcribed and appears at the bottom usually in the same language same language subtitles these have been used in different literacy programs throughout the world work well may a large percentage of the populace may be Alire it so they put same language subtitles and you start seeing it more and more in television here in the United States you might be watching a reality TV TV show and you don't even notice it but everything that characters say or the narrator says is appearing in English in captions at the bottom those would be saying the same language subtitles but when we think about subtitles in the context of translation we're usually thinking about subtitles that have been translated so foreign language subtitles these are the translation this is the translation of the dialogue or narration into a different language so that's what we're gonna focus on for the rest of this video so I wanted to make the point that subtitling is a form of translation right subtitling is the written translation we know that all translation is written interpreting a spoken subtitling is the written translation of the dialogue or very frequently the narration of a film or some other type of video presentation so you are translating for the translator the subtitle you're translating that dialogue or that narration you might first have to create a transcript which is very tedious time-consuming and kind of a pain or you may be given hopefully an electronic file but then you have to make sure that that that's script that's my second bullet point often what characters say it's not the same as the script you have to make sure that that script reflects what is actually being said in the screen player script so and that's often not the case and you want to make sure that third bullet point here your subtitle is what you're actually translating reflects the words that are spoken as part of the dialogue or the narration of that video um speaking of movies for example or television series that you know the quantity of which is just exploding with these streaming services like Amazon Hulu Netflix and all the other ones sling there's tons of them right and they're all producing their own original television content movies and series the dialogue in these types of products in this type of content often involves really informal language even slang right street language very informal and so that poses a challenge to translation because most of the time translators work in more structured higher register types of genres there are also something other factors that make the translation in subtitles challenging right and that's because the translation of dialogue or narration may be constrained by at least a couple of factors that we'll talk about one is the screen width right the aspect ratio you run out of screen you just can't fit a lot of a lot of characters a lot of words on the screen and also readers can only read visually and process mentally a certain amount of text and a given amount of time so we have the area on the screen and we also have the processing time in our heads that's gonna sometimes limit and so we may not be able to translate every single word that's set but we still have to capture the meaning and that's kind of one of the differences it's not really on the slide to point out between dubbing right when you see something when you hear the language track in in the foreign language there they it might not match what's being translated the translation so if you had the foreign language audio let's say Spanish there the Spanish language audio which is a dubbed version and you had Spanish linguist subtitles they might not match because they have different constraints people can process spoken speech faster then they can read written speech on the screen so because of this the translator often has to come up with some creative solutions and you have to be very skilled and have sort of an artistic temperament right sensitivity to translate effectively this type of content so also you might have to use special tools special software even special hardware special equipment to place the subtitles onto the video clip um talk a little bit about some of these specifications you probably never noticed or maybe you did notice as you're watching some of this um captioned or subtitle remember it's not so important that we have this terminology because it's very fluid the distinctions are blurry as you watch captions subtitles whether they're in your same language or in a foreign language you may never noticed some of these things but they are constraints or specifications technical specifications for subtitles I mean there's no master manual anywhere some countries for example the BBC has produced a manual if you want to google that BBC specifications for subtitles some countries have specifications but in general there's no global standard for these but I've sort of given you some generic specifications here on this slide subtitle should be centered and placed as low as possible typically on the lower one fifth or one sixth of the screen you may have noticed that movie screens are getting wider and wider and sort of shallower and shallower so that's becoming a challenge subtitle should be readable so that means that they have to stand out so sometimes you may have seen subtitles used to be produced in a yellow color and then they sort of went to any more off-white or cream color and now you see a lot of subtitles that are actually white but if you look really closely on a high res or high definition television you'll see that there's a shadow behind each letter that helps them pop or there might be what's called a ghost box that in grey box that you can see the the subtitles stand out against so you can see a couple of examples here on the screen of the shadowing they should be in a clear font typically what's called a sans serif font like the ones you see on the screen so something like Arial or a Helvetica as opposed to Times okay also there's a restriction or limitation traditionally on the number of characters you can have in each line and the number of lines you rarely see more than two lines stacked of subtitles on a screen is you just can't read that text that fast and then the lines are typically limited to 35 characters each that's usually about five to six to seven words per line also if you pay attention the titles will be on the screen for different durations of time but usually not very long because people thought fast camera angles change there are transitions between scenes and things like that so as I mentioned earlier a person can only process visually visual text right can only process that mentally so fast so if you have a title that's one or two words like good morning it could be up for maybe one and a half seconds if you have a single line like you see down here with Keanu Reeves I was hoping I could reason with them that title might be up for a maximum of three seconds and then if you have two lines maybe it's two characters who are dialogue or just one character who's saying more than six or seven words that's gonna be on the screen for a maximum of seven seconds these are again generalizations but typically you'll find that they're a little bit more on the specifications typically you'll see that the subtitles appear just a microsecond before the characters in the mouth starts moving and then the linger they'll have a laugh so they'll have a slight lead time and they'll have a slight slight lag so before they talk and it lingers or lags on the screen for just when you're doing subtitle translation you have to be viewing it the movie the scenes right not necessarily always a movie it could be a documentary it could be a commercial for a local car dealership but there might be transitions or cuts or camera changes and so the subtitles can't stay on the screen as the as the camera cuts right so you have to be aware of camera shot changes such as cuts and transitions um also if you pay attention to your captions or titles you'll notice that certain typefaces such as italic or punctuation like dashes and ellipses have a special purpose typically like you can see with the Arnold Schwarzenegger I think this might be from the movie predator if two different characters have their lines at the same time they're dialoguing but there are two different characters you'll have the dashes to indicate dialogue it's not necessary if only one person is talking even if two people are present ellipses that dot dot that means that the subtitle is going to continue or the person is going to continue talking and a new subtitle will be there so you can see I think this movie is called Ted I'm down here in the lower right hand corner you can see after the word money almost it goes dot dot that's an ellipses that just means the same character is going to continue talking and that's going to continue to another camera shot or just another two two line stack of subtitles sometimes you'll see or you're hear a voice from off camera maybe the phone rings and you can hear the answering machine in the other room or something like that typically when a person speaking is off screen like that or it's voice over is even more frequent the titles will appear in italics so those are just a few examples there are other examples of how translators use punctuation and the actual type itself in subtitles in a conventional way I'm finally just a quick note or a few notes about how subtitles are produced um so movie studios the big the big ones little ones independent studios streaming services like Netflix and other video production companies like the company down the street or at university they will hopefully hire qualified translators to produce subtitles there are numerous some apps and software programs that can be used to create subtitles so you can just google those subtitling software subtitling equipment subtitling apps you'll find that also there's a curious phenomenon that you may or may not be aware of but I think it really started sort of in the anime community where people would want to either collaborate on subtitles or subtitle a film or a cartoon an animated animated program that didn't have subtitles in their language so they would download the subtitles say in English or in Spanish a very common language and they would overwrite that text file you can see an example down here in the lower right and translate and then they would upload that back to the website that's called fansubbing and if you just Google for example subtitle download sites or fansub sites you'll find that there are and the upper the upper image on the screen is from one of those sites I can't remember the name of the site and you can see that they have just hundreds of different television shows and movies and for each of those let's just say it's the Walking Dead for example for the Walking Dead you will find each episode of each season in dozens of languages and not only that but several versions for each language for each episode for each season so it's crazy and these people are volunteer translators okay so fansubbing or some subtitled downloads if you want to google that then finally video aggregators or video websites services like YouTube also encourage strongly encourage content I think maybe they may start requiring it at some point but they strongly encourage content creators to add captions and subtitles to their videos and they even make it easy because if you upload a video it will ask you what the video language is if you check English Spanish French or another very common language German right Portuguese Chinese then the magical computers at Google and YouTube will go into the audio file associated with that video and automatically create captions process takes you know anywhere from a few minutes to a couple of days so if you go back to that video you'll see that automatic captions have been created and then there are ways pretty easy to create either automatically subtitles in different languages or to download that file edit it right really refine it so that is perfect and then you can also overwrite that in two different languages I'm gonna upload a separate video about adding subtitles in different languages to YouTube videos so that was a really quick intro to the phenomenon of captions and subtitles in the early 21st century just to recap as we've seen in increasing screens streaming services and content from many countries this has led to an increase in demand for captions and subtitles you've never seen as many captions in as you do today and tomorrow you'll see more next you'll see more so because of this captioning and subtitling our scene is increasingly important and valuable again it's practically a requirement for anyone who knows what they're doing on social media or digital video production or filmmaking that those products that content be captioned in the same language but also be translated and have subtitles in multiple other languages um as I mentioned a few times the distinctions we used to talk about you know closed captions open captions same language subtitles foreign language subtitles those are all kind of blurring in this context and kind of a hybrid form is emerging I think so it doesn't really matter if we say captions or subtitles no big deal we talked about subtitles as a form of translation is something that requires a lot of skill and creativity because for one reason subtitles are subject to many technical specifications so that in terms of their length right number duration on the screen font punctuation etc and finally this is a good thing technology's made it easier for any translator whether amateur or professional to produce and share subtitles for their favorite content and hopefully as an extra stream of income if you're lucky enough to work in subtitling I always thought that would be the dream job right to be hired you know as an in-house translator for Columbia Pictures or Fox or one of the major studios I'd be so cool to just sit around subtitling films all day into your favorite into your favorite language on languages anyways that's it for the lesson hope you've enjoyed it and I'll see you in the next video lesson