And no more shitty subtitle fonts, either.
Well, they will admittedly remain shitty for a while, but the end of shittiness is nigh, for I have launched a project that will commission and design and then test a series of fonts custom-engineered for the demands of reading captions and subtitles. This is for real.
Read the new site, Screenfont.ca, and for the love of God stop using Arial.
“Deaf, partly deaf push for better closed-captioning”:
With the help of a sign language interpreter, he explained that weather and traffic reports and some breaking news reports have incomplete closed captioning, making them difficult to understand.
That’s what happens with captions spooled off a Teleprompter. They don’t even count – literally. (See longer article.)
“Crystal was so five minutes ago”
Crystal sang of “Mystic River”: “There’s a beating; it’s like a Disney-Eisner meeting.” But the closed-captioning on Disney-owned ABC instead said, “It’s like a Disney-Pixar meeting,” leading some to believe the network wasn’t forewarned warned about the shot at Disney chair Michael Eisner.
Do you think if Marc Okrand were still wandering the halls bragging about flying out to Hollywood to oversee captioning of the Oscars this sort of thing would have happened? Kaplach!
“Media as ‘bridge’: It’s for players to decide”:
On the idea of subtitling television programmes for the deaf, for example, Singapore Press Holdings’ (SPH) MediaWorks executive director Wee Leong How said the ministries’ reply had already noted that broadcasters had explained previously that they faced resource and time constraints for such a move.
What the hell do you expect from Singapore? I’m surprised they do not flog deaf people there, or perhaps simply imprison them.
Indeed, even the VCDs and DVDs of the original versions are subtitled in English for the benefit of those who do not understand Hindi. According to dealers here, the subtitling is done primarily in Pakistan. “It is done in Malaysia as well but the quality of the stuff coming in from there isn’t good enough,” says one of them.
And it’s a whole lot better over here, is it?
Two items on same-language subtitling:
“Open Letter to the World Bank e-forum on ICT for Rural Development”:
There are two extremely important initiatives on literacy in India. One is software in Indian languages from Tata Consulting, which has helped more than 80,000 users in areas where computers are available. The more important initiative is captioning of Bollywood movies in the language of the movie. This allows illiterate people in the audience who sing along to follow the text and gradually pick up basic literacy. This practice is helping several hundred million people in India, and will help many more as it is more widely practiced. Closed-captioning of TV would help even more.
BBC Prime seeks to benefit from pushing education angle”:
Dunsford explained that BBC Prime is pitched as a tool of learning English. He said the key to localizing the channel is airing most of the programs with subtitles.
After the initial surprise of seeing subtitles, people are getting used to the idea, he said. If you have a certain level of understanding, the subtitles can be used to help improve your understanding. If you have no understanding, you can still watch and enjoy the programs.
For many years, the channel was unable to even consider adding another cost in terms of subtitling, as it was not financially viable, Dunsford recalled. Only as BBC Prime expanded its distribution across Europe, Africa and the Middle East, and became a financially successful channel, was it able to look at investing back into the channel through localization.
In Hungary, without the subtitling we would not have the distribution, he said.
Dunsford declined to reveal the costs of subtitling or launching in Hungary, but maintained that subtitling opened a new way of promoting the channel in the country. The work was outsourced to the local arm of Broadcast Text, a multinational broadcast subtitling company.
Well, this is probably bullshit, of course. Any programming from the recent decade would have been closed-captioned to begin with. If the BBC were truly concerned about cost, they’d simply decode the captions, perhaps using the flawed DTT system of re-typesetting them in Tiresias.
Oh, but wait? You don’t want captions? You want same-language subtitles, bottom centred, with no sound effects or non-speech information and heavy editing? Right. That’s really gonna help an ESL learner.