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Video Captions/Subtitles: What do they do right and wrong? What are the best examples you've seen? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 month ago by comfy@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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Films and TV shows and more often have subtitles, which are helpful for enjoying muted video, translation, people with hearing impairment, people struggling to understand accents, checking fast unclear dialogue and other reasons. They are important, and sometimes it's clear when they do something right or wrong.

Maybe we can't expect them all to be works of art, but there are certainly some easy wins even in the industrial media environment. What do you think?

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[–] comfy@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

An interesting example I saw was in Archer. During an agitated rant, Archer finally interjects demanding someone answer the phone. The next shot is a plain still shot of the telephone, which the captions helpfully emphasise [PHONE NOT RINGING]; a recurring joke is Archer's constant ear-ringing due to careless gun use.

Having seen other, more careless translations, I can easily see jokes (or in other contexts, important clues) like this being missed and it made me think about how film techniques can imply audio silently. If there's a plain shot of a phone, a hearing impaired person might reasonably assume it's a visual implication that the phone is ringing.