In the era of streaming services and muted autoplay videos in social media feeds, videos without subtitles are inconceivable and unmarketable. You’d be way off the mark if you thought that subtitles were “just text” at the bottom of the screen that can be quickly generated by means of automatic speech recognition. Subtitles like these distract at best, as opposed to capturing your audience’s attention. Find out what it takes to make subtitles easy to read and why subtitling is a linguistic and technical balancing act.
Subtitles – the key to truly understanding video
Completing the last part of an e-learning module whilst on the train to work, following Jamie Oliver’s cooking instructions on your tablet next to the oven (with extractor fan blaring into your ear), getting that all-important first impression of a company from their image film while waiting for a new client, or watching your favourite Spanish series in the original language, although your own Spanish has been reduced to a pitiful almost non-existence since that Erasmus exchange semester 15 years ago – videos are omnipresent, and subtitles are essential to ensure that video content is actually understood. Creating subtitles requires, first and foremost, perfect command of the source language as well as the target language. In addition, various formal aspects must be taken into account when subtitling, which significantly influence the readability of subtitles.
As much text as necessary, as little as possible
Subtitles should reproduce the spoken word appropriately and accurately in a language other than the original language of the video, or in the same language. Subtitles should appear on the screen in sync with the spoken language and be displayed for sufficient time so that they can be read easily. Placing subtitles, so-called ‘spotting’, is carried out with the help of subtitling software, which makes it possible to time the entry and exit of a subtitle accurately and in sync with the image. Depending on the speed of the speech, this means that the content must be reformulated and cut down considerably, repetitions and filler words have to be eliminated, and tenses adjusted. Especially when shortening texts, subtitlers need a real flair for language to ensure that no information gets lost, and style does not suffer. After all, the target audience should never get the impression that something has been withheld from them or that something has been distorted. Furthermore, it is also important to take into account visual and contextual elements as well as cuts, because scene changes bring additional movement into the picture and make it difficult to read subtitles. A subtitler has to constantly weigh these sometimes contradictory aspects against each other, and aims to meet these different demands in such a way that the statement, meaning, and tonality of the source text are not lost. Good subtitles are those that go “unnoticed” – and accomplishing that is a true balancing act.
Syntax sets the beat
The way in which the text is broken down into subtitles also significantly influences whether subtitles are easy to read, and thus whether they are understandable or not. Where a line break is set is therefore crucial to ensure that subtitles are easy to read. The same goes for the length of a sentence and how many subtitles it extends over, and whether the upper line of text in a two-line subtitle is shorter or longer than the lower line of text. In principle, the subtitle text should be segmented according to units of meaning. Thus, if possible, there should be no line break between related sentence clauses, phrases, or attributes. Well-segmented subtitles facilitate readability and make reading and understanding much easier.
Transforming the spoken word
Subtitling is also about translating spoken language into written language. There are rules for written language, and as with all written texts, readers expect them to be orthographically, grammatically, and syntactically correct. Professionalism is associated with accuracy – so a written text does not forgive mistakes, and the same applies to subtitles. Oral speech is often spontaneous and unplanned, so it contains a great deal of filler words and redundancies. Moreover, oral speech is not always syntactically and semantically correct. Our brain automatically corrects such things while we are listening, and they often go unnoticed and do not affect our comprehension of what is said. But the reception and processing of written text works differently, which is why the spoken word cannot simply be reproduced verbatim. Rather, superfluous redundancies, relative sentences with the wrong reference, and long multi-clause sentences have to be cut from the subtitles, so that our brain can absorb and process the information more easily.
Subtitling is therefore a complex process, and professionals will take many linguistic and technical aspects into account when producing subtitles. If you want your videos to be understood in another language, or even without sound, make sure you have readable subtitles.
