Be Natural Needs to Be Accessible

July 31, 2019August 6, 2019reelwords

Review of Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché (2018)

Old black and white photo of a sign on wall inside an industrial space that says BE NATURAL. — The sign at Alice Guy-Blaché’s Solax Studio in the US. She wanted her actors to remember this guideline in order to avoid the overacting so common in films during the silent era.

Six years ago, I made a pledge to a Kickstarter campaign for the documentary Be Natural. There have been some bumps in the road for supporters, which is to be expected for a passion project, I suppose: some of the perks never arrived, some were disappointing, and some have yet to arrive (promised post–home video release). It seems creators Pamela Green and Jarik van Sluijs had more success in the campaign and developments with the film than they had anticipated. I applaud them. They’ve brought a major project to fruition.

However, when I finally got to see it at one of only three Toronto screenings, I was underwhelmed. This was mostly due to its inaccessibility but also its overall direction. Then I learned more about the premise of Alice being “discovered” by the filmmakers. I’d like to share some thoughts on this film because I’ve yet to see a review online that wasn’t bursting at the seams with enthusiasm, and I think some balance in its reception is merited.

Robert Redford and narrator Jodie Foster are listed as two of the executive producers, which gives it some cachet, I expect. However, direction by Green is problematic. As a backer, I got to see teasers and contacted the production company about issues with the subtitling as it stood then; I did not get a reply. The final product is less than accessible to several groups of people.

The music is far too loud and drowns out other elements, making it hard to follow the extremely fast pace of the doc. There are some interesting ideas for indicating sources—for example, audio tape via a little icon in the corner of the screen—but often these are more cute than necessary, adding clutter to a busy screen; I found it hard to watch such indicators, plus maps, dynamic travel routes, superimposed pictures and image captions, and subtitles. The viewer must be resigned to picking and choosing what information they want to take in, which is a shame because it’s quite interesting.

I wish I could have acted as a consultant for them on the function and form of effective captions and subtitles. In fact, there are no captions at all for the film because of the overcrowded shots, so right off the bat the film is not available to Deaf, deaf, or hard of hearing viewers, or any other group who uses captions. Also, the subtitles are full of bad line breaks and inconsistencies. The worst practice is when the text was deemed worthy to highlight, it is often presented in a cursive font in paragraph form across the width of the screen, making it difficult to read, particularly as there is a great deal of figured background used. Also, the reading speed required for the longer excerpts is too high given the font and form. Accessibility to the French audio is therefore very poor through the subtitling.

The other unfortunate directorial choice made is the pace of the overall contents. Understandably, the creators wanted to share as much of Alice’s history as possible within the time available, and the story is fascinating. But too much of the search efforts are shown, so that clips from Alice’s films that are highlighted are on-screen for about one second (maybe two seconds) each. In that time, the viewer has to take in the visual and the captioned title and date before they are on to another example; a series of these make it impossible to really learn much about the films Guy-Blaché made, which I would have thought was a major goal of the documentary. So, the information itself is often inaccessible.

This is the type of film that would have benefited from subtitle editing (and captioning), and it could have been done if a director of accessibility and translation had been consulted, as recommended by Pablo Romero-Fresco. As it stands, there are multiple barriers to the documentary.

But that’s only what I gleaned from watching it. I’ve since learned that, in fact, Alice’s history has been under our noses all along. (Note to self: do your homework before backing on Kickstarter.) It turns out that there have been a few documentaries made about her already, including a 1996 Canadian doc and an eponymous 1997 German one. There’s also a book about her, Alice Guy-Blaché: Lost Visionary of the Cinema by Alison McMahan (2003). And there is no lack of knowledge and discussion about her in academia or the blogosphere/internet. So, the hype of discovering Alice is misplaced.

Alice’s life is an interesting topic to cover in a documentary film, to be sure, but Be Natural seems a bit meta, focusing more on Green’s journey to find Alice than being excited to share the story in a well-paced exposition of Alice’s story. I came away feeling I had missed a lot of the audio and visual in it and retained bare bones. Another audience member asked me afterwards if I remembered the location of the Solax studio, and we decided we’d have to google it when we got home. (It was Fort Lee, New Jersey.)

I feel like the film festival and critical hype is due to others not having done their homework, either. It’s a nice film, but it’s not earth-shattering in form or as provenance. Since it’s so hard to find screenings, why not find some clips of her films on YouTube or watch this introduction to Alice Guy-Blaché on Vimeo? The captions here aren’t perfect either, but the video allows you the time to appreciate the creative and technical contributions Alice made in a man’s industry a hundred years ago.

PS: I did have to laugh at one clip that was shown long enough to take in. In the 1913 A House Divided, about a separated couple living together, there’s some acrimony. Plus ça change…

Perhaps “Word Nerding through Netflix”

April 2, 2019April 2, 2019reelwords

Read the background and objections here, then delve in to my POV.
Please note I’ve used quotation marks rather than italicizing words as words (in captions/subtitles) with the aim of making a more accessible document.

Spoiler alert: you aren’t going to learn a language with the “Language Learning with Netflix” browser extension. You may confirm what you know, learn the odd word, or see something spelled that you’d only heard before, but you aren’t going to learn a language.

Now, I’m a language nerd, so I’m not knocking different modes of language acquisition or people’s desire to expand their worldview or personal skills. But to get viewers’ hopes up by presenting this tool thus is like saying you’ll learn to be a chef by working as a cashier at McDonald’s. You’ll learn stuff, it may be fun—it may even be “cool” as the linked article says—but you won’t be able to converse in the original language of the show. Especially based on most of the subtitles.

There are indeed some very cool functionalities to this tool. You can choose to see the automatic voice recognition–software’s subtitle translation or the human translation or both. Most useful is the ability to set the automatic pause on each text box. Unfortunately, the two versions of subtitles are so poorly handled that there’s no way in Hades you could learn much language from them.

I experimented with a film and language I was familiar with: “Incendies” by director Denis Villeneuve (2010) in French—Québécois to be exact, which is no mean feat for a French-from-France-translator to tackle. (I know because I went to translation school and, being in Canada, we dealt with Québécois French as much as European French.) (And sidebar, it’s a difficult film to watch but excellent. I recommend it.) I chose to watch both the “machine” translations (as Netflix calls the autocraptions) and the “human” translations simultaneously. In the following examples, when all three languages are shown, the original French is on top, machine in the middle, and human on the bottom. The Arabic is not subtitled. And by the way, I could have selected a film in any of the languages I know and found similar issues; this is just an illustration.
Let’s look at some examples.

Longshot man and woman approaching their car in a city , captioned J'ai la crisse de paix/I have the crease of peace/I feel so fucking peaceful
“J’ai la crisse de paix” is not about “the crease of peace” or even, dictionary-wise, “the crisis of peace”: it’s swearing with “Christ” and colloquially would be used as in the human subtitled “I feel so fucking peaceful.” So, that part is good! If it were France, it would likely have been some form of “putain,” but it looks like the translator asked someone who was familiar with swearing as you’d find it in Quebec or perhaps Maritime Canada (because as we’ll see below, the rest of the translation is problematic). But how did a machine supposedly translate “la crisse” to “the crease” if they’re using a corpus dictionary? Autocraptions 0, #NoMoreCraptions 1.

Young man at side of woman in hospital stretcher captioned Souffle haletant/Breathless breath
“Haleter” means “to pant,” “gasp,” or “puff” in French, but for the moment, let’s look at the autocraption “(Breathless breath)” which a human has not chosen to correct. That’s somewhat of a grammatical nullification in English, never mind a contradiction in meaning. In this scene, the young man is upset, stressed. A good subtitle would have replaced the machine one with something like “(sighs with stress)” or “(anxiously sighs).” This subtitle is used many times in the film, unfortunately.

Doctor examining woman in hospital, adult children looking on, captioned Elle est absente en general/She is absent in general/She's usually confused
Here the doctor is taking a history of the woman and asking her children questions about her health and behaviour of late. The machine subtitle is typically autogenerated: it just translated the line literally. The subtitler is just wrong. “Absente” and “désorientée” or “confuse” wouldn’t be synonymous here. In fact, here’s an argument for giving captioners and subtitlers reasonable work timelines instead of ridiculous demands of urgency. Had the subtitler watched the film first, they would have known that the woman has PTSD, which is unknown to her children, so her son just finds her emotionally unavailable and is very hurt and angry about that. Therefore, the subtitle must be “She’s always absent”: the English audience would understand that it doesn’t mean just physically but more so emotionally; the always would be more colloquial than “usually,” and it would be understood as “[not literally] always” but “[pretty much] always.” So if someone went to a French class and used what they’d learned here and said to the teacher, “Je suis absente” to indicate they needed further help, they’d be laughed at. Not what you want when learning a language.

Young woman looking from desk skeptically at offscreen woman, captioned J'etais meme pas nee/I was not even born/You're kidding right? I wasn't born
Here the “You’re kidding right?” is a hangover from the previous shot/subtitle and shouldn’t even be included again. But the young woman is being asked about something from thirty-five years ago and predictably responds with the French line as shown. The machine version is literally correct but not idiomatically. The human translation is incomplete and misses the mark, thus leaving the viewer in the dark. “I wasn’t born” is not the same as a snarky “I wasn’t even born yet” or “I wasn’t even alive then.” So let’s imagine someone (for some reason) wanted to learn how to say “I wasn’t born” in French: they would use a totally incorrect/inappropriate construction, confusing their listener. Part of learning a language is about clarity, so that there is no miscommunication.

Woman looking distraught in the front of a bus, captioned Cris de fillette/Cree of little girl
The translation by machine apparently went for an aural equivalent here; a human should have changed this to “(cries of little girl).” Unfortunately, this one is doubly problematic in Canada: “Cree” is the name of the Algonquian language of the indigenous Cree people. Confusion could reign supreme here, especially in a film so much about culture and place. Furthermore, knowing it was a Canadian film, viewers might see the subtitle briefly, wonder at it, and then lose track after it has passed by but still be pondering the meaning: audience immersion down the toilet. It certainly would detract from the cultural aspect of learning French.

Longshot of open-doored car in the countryside, with a man pointing the way to a woman on the road, captioned Stridulations d'insectes/Stridulations of insects
This is a good example of the need to understand diction and register in audiovisual translation. “Stridulations” can mean “chirps,” “chirring,” or “shrill sounds.” It refers to the sound crickets and other insects make by rubbing their legs, wings, etc. together. In English, “stridulations” would only be used within a scientific context, perhaps even only an academic one. Here, it’s just about the countryside setting, and we would say “(insects chirring)”—if at all. There’s an argument that the caption is not even necessary as it doesn’t advance the plot: we can see it’s empty and remote. In any event, a language student who then said on a beautiful summer night in Provence, “Oh listen to the stridulations of insects!” would be looked at like they had three heads…or too big a head. Subtitling and captioning is not about dictionary and thesaurus use. The audiovisual translator has to understand meaning, context, and changes in the target language. For the record, I don’t believe the audio has insects: I think it’s birds and the wind.

Arab older man captioned C'est la Femme qui chante./It's the woman singing./She's the Woman who Sings. Number 72.
The machine definitely blew this one with its literal translation. This is a key thematic and character-relevant phrase and is even a chapter title in the film. The human was closer but the “Number 72” is repeated in the next subtitle. Also, there is no understanding of capitalization conventions: as an epithet and important theme, “the Woman Who Sings” needs a capital on “who” in headline style; here it’s a mixture of headline and sentence. Probably the subtitler is working under the misapprehension that “little words” don’t get capitalized, a rule from the dinosaur age. All caps on the phrase would forewarn a language learner that this is not everyday usage.

Arab older man, captioned Inspiration/Inspiration
Here, “Inspiration” (and elsewhere “(Grande respiration)” as “(Great breath)”) is a total craption. Inspiration comes from the Holy Spirit or a muse or a lightbulb above your head, but its Latin root about breathing cannot be applied here. Furthermore, it’s hardly a notable or significant inhalation (unlike an example below) and could have been omitted. I don’t understand how a professional translator or QC person could have stetted this machine error.

Vista with woman at wall and car in midground, chapter title La Femme Qui Chante, captioned Un homme parle en arabe sur un haut-parleur/A man speakes in Arabic on a speaker/THE WOMAN WHO SINGS

Vista with woman at wall and car in midground, chapter title La Femme Qui Chante, captioned Gazouillis d'oiseaux/Bird chirping/THE WOMAN WHO SINGS
The errors in these subtitles are obvious in that the chapter title denies access to the viewer of the other subtitles if using the human version. “La Femme Qui Chante” should have been made a forced narrative, and the correct translations of the audio should have been “(man speaking over PA system)” and “(birds chirping),” despite the latter being insignificant. Most importantly, during the top shot, the young woman is sobbing (plot pertinent!) and that absolutely should be captioned, with the PA part placed on the next shot where that audio continues. No one’s learning any language here.

Middleeastern-dressed nurse speaking over an ill Middleeastern woman's bed, captioned Mme Mika?/Ms. Maika?/Mrs Manka?
As far as I know, Arab culture doesn’t espouse women’s lib, so the machine “Ms.” is a cultural #SubtitleFail. Then, it seems the translator is used to British conventions because in North America we use a period after “Mrs.” and the surname is misspelled. In any case, these inconsistencies would be confusing to a language learner without the knowledge of these cultural points.

Middleeastern-dressed nurse speaking over an ill Middleeastern woman's bed, captioned Elle a recueilli les enfants./She collected the children./She safeguarded the babies
Here the nurse is interpreting from the patient’s Arabic. “Safeguarded” is the wrong diction for this scene: it’s too formal and, in terms of babies, is a bit archaic. For the newborns, who are essentially refugees, “took in” is an appropriate choice. A student using this would sound like they were talking about a report by a board of governors rather than caring for little ones.

Young woman facing young man, her face expressing horror, captioned Inspiration/Inspiration
No spoilers, but here is another misrepresentation of “(Inspiration).” This is a gut-wrenching gasp of horror at the first of two climaxes in the film…

Closeup of young man and woman, captioned Je vous aime/I like You/I love you.

Closeup of young man and woman, captioned Vore mere, Nawal/Your mother, Nawal./Your mother.

Closeup of young man and woman, captioned Reniflements/Sniffles/Nawal
The problems with these three subsequent subtitles are obvious. Again, they take the viewer out of the narrative, disrupting their immersion in the poignant dénouement of the story, and teaching nothing about language.

These are just a few examples to illustrate how the notion of teaching a language is far more complex than throwing up some setting options and calling it language learning.
Yes, it’s great if you know some, say, Polish and want to check what a character said, or if you need to pause the subtitles for better comprehension. But to suggest that language lessons are being made available by a streaming service that is known for its problematic subtitles and its craptions is misleading. It’s just another way Netflix holds a monopoly on the international offerings of video-on-demand but is putting the cart way before the horse. They need to get serious about native target-language speakers as subtitle and caption editors and fix the timed text before they start misinforming the public about foreign languages. For now, I’d recommend using some language-learning software or apps, or—much better—taking accredited classes in the language you want to learn. You can’t learn how to drive an eighteen-wheeler on the highway by trying out a Segway.

Interview with Shell Little: Captions and Neurodiversity

February 27, 2019March 18, 2019reelwords

Headshot of young white woman in makeup and lilac-colored shoulder-length hair with bangs wearing a mauve top, necklace and dark jacket. She is looking into the camera.

At the #a11yTO 2018 conference, I heard Shell Little speak on accessibility, and she shared quite openly about what it’s like to be neurodivergent. I was really affected by her talk because, although I advocate for captions for people including those with cognitive differences, I hadn’t really heard from someone so candidly about their experiences. Many emails and DMs later, Shell and I have assembled an interview that explores what are sometimes called creative or alternative captions and how a neurodivergent (ND) person is helped or hindered by them.

RW: Right, so I’m on the fence about these because the creative people making them often don’t get accessibility. But then some accessibility folks are using creative means to be make captions more usable! Some people are experimenting with colours (old hat in the UK and Europe) but also icons, avatars, and other non-traditional captioning ideas. I remember you saying movement across a screen could present a barrier to retention, so what about something like this?

Please see the trailer for John Wick 2 at the 1:24min mark; these captions are for style more than accessibility, but I wondered how they might be received by an ND person.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4425200/videoplayer/vi1127331353?ref_=tt_ov_vi

And here’s a combo platter of style and caption provision. In Man on Fire, this scene has the page erasing the caption. Annoying? Frustrating? Not an issue?

Medium shot of three people walking and talking in shadow against a domestic courtyard background. A full caption line says, Approximately a month.

Shot of a white hand turning the page of a document in a binder; as the page is turning, the caption from above is being erased by the turning page, so that only the following is shown in this still: Approximatel

SL: Wow, I have a lot of mixed feelings about these creative captions! On one hand, they seem really cool because they are integrating the text into the story, making the text feel like it’s not just slapped on top of the screen, but right in there with it. I also think it’s cool to give someone who is HoH/D/deaf an interesting experience with their CCs. Making the style reflect the tone could add another layer to entertainment.

Now, I could see the motion being a bit much for someone who has sensory-related disabilities. And, if not done in a tasteful way, it could become a big distraction. I think the idea of less is more could apply for something like creative captions.

On the other hand, I play a lot of video games, and that kind of creative style text is really, really common. Not exactly like the page-turning example you provided, but more like the ASL-translation type of “flowing” text in that John Wick example. In games that have no actual spoken words, they use style to push the tone of the text. An example of a game would be Ori and the Blind Forest. Here is a link for an example of how the text flows across the screen and is part of the scene itself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufD833Vgfnk

The number one thing when it comes to cognitive accessibility is context. If the text is the main point of the scene, then it can have a lot more liberty to be moving in general. Much like how moving content works for Pause, Stop, or Hide buttons. If the movement is deemed essential, such as a spinner for loading, that kind of movement is okay and is helpful. But if the text is being used in a very distracting way, I could see it being a barrier, for sure. For video games, text is often done on a frozen screen or a cut scene where the text is essential, and there isn’t always a ton going on (depending on the game). That can’t be said for movies and TV shows. I think to have a full understanding of how I feel, I’d need to watch a full movie with the creative captions. Part of me feels like I would get used to it and enjoy the integration as I rely heavily on captions when watching movies. But as I mentioned in my talk, there are so many types of cognitive disabilities. I’d be curious to hear what someone with Autism would think as well!

RW: The game you shared brought up some more questions for me.

First, it drives me crazy that all the lines start with capital letters, even if each caption is not a new sentence, and there’s no punctuation. But being dyslexic, is it actually less cumbersome for you to process by being cleaner-looking in that way? I’m a prescriptivist mostly and am wondering if I need to shift my understanding to include how cognitive disabilities might actually make this style better received.

SL: I’ve seen a lot of different ways to do captioning throughout the years, especially when we’re talking about the video-game space. The style of captions Ori uses delivers content that is short in length but with no proper grammar in terms of sentence structure. To me, that looks sharp, clean, and is easy to consume. I honestly had to go back to the clip and look to see if there really was lack of punctuation because it mattered so little to me at the time I was playing the game! Thanks to texting and IM’ing, I’m very comfortable consuming small portions of content that lack proper punctuation, capitalization, and sentence structure, so much so I didn’t even notice it in these captions.

RW: Ah, my query may be a function of my job—and generation! I use short forms in texts, but punctuation has to go in 😛

SL: Why I think this style of captions works is—again—all about the context. The statements are short and to the point. They’re delivered in parallel to a lot of moving content in some segments, and they’re short enough that I can get through the information while fighting the moving content going on around it. In a race for my attention, motion will always beat out written text. Now, if there was a nonsense paragraph of captions with no punctuation and run-on sentences, that would be infuriating. This style of captioning works because the information is delivered in bite-size packages. I would take these small five- to ten-word captions over having to read extensive text any day.

RW: So, it’s context and quantity, it sounds like.

You also said you’re dyscalculic. In captions, would you prefer to see numerals or numbers as words, considering the speed of captions? Would it make a difference if they were smaller numbers (captioned 10 or ten) or larger (captioned 2000 or two thousand)?

SL: First, I would say my issue with numbers in captions would be more due to my dyslexia than my dyscalculia. Unless they were asking me to hold meaning to the numbers or do math! Example: doing conversions of currency or going from Celsius to Fahrenheit—never going to happen, ha-ha!

But, ah, yes…numbers in captions! This is a perfect example why captions are so important for ND people like me. It’s about receiving information in more than one format. Hearing something said and being able to read it simultaneously is a way to solidify the meaning of that spoken content. So, if a character yells “Fifty thousand dollars? He wants that much?!” and the captions read [$50,000? He wants that much?!], I have enough context and am not required to figure out how many zeros are on that number. No need to hold my fingers up to make sure my brain isn’t moving the comma and that it really is fifty thousand and not five.

Where I run into issues is subtitles. With subtitles I’m only able to get the information in one format. I watch a lot of K-drama [Korean drama tv shows], and the money there causes me constant frustration. This is due to the number of zeros used in their money. For example, $5 is roughly 5,000 won. So, you can imagine how many zeros end up being used when we are talking about large figures. My rule would be: if the information is being delivered in more than one format, using numerals is fine. The issue with that is we can’t assume everyone who is ND is also hearing. I’m sure there are plenty of ND people who are also HoH/D/deaf. So, to be truly inclusive, I would lean towards the option of writing out larger quantities.

RW: So many variables! I recently contributed to a LinkedIn post that invited discussion about the “accessible seating” in a cinema:

Shot taken from cinema seating of a section before it that is ostensibly reserved for "accessible seating": there is an area of four seats' width barred off at the sides from the other seats in the middle of the row. This section is in the second row of the cinema, with a transverse aisle behind it.

Picture by Thea Kurdi, LinkedIn February 6, 2019. Used with permission.

I posted: If you were additionally using a CaptiView, there’s nowhere to attach it, it’s visible to the entire audience, and it’s too close to the screen to allow for the quick eye refocusing that’s needed. Also, it assumes only two people in wheelchairs [or other assistive technology] want to go to a movie. What if a bunch wanted to go as a group? But mostly, relegating people with disabilities to the crappiest section of the theatre is a statement of its own.

To be fair, perhaps this and all cinemas can’t be made perfectly accessible. No product or service can. But attempts to at least recognize, address, and improve barriers to accessibility are important.

So maybe there’s no way of making all creative captioning accessible to all users. What works for an ND user might not work for a low-vision user, for example. But it’s kind of nice to dream of a future time when you could open your streaming app and have not only (excellent) captions as an option—as in real captions, not subtitles being appended in lieu of captioning—but also multiple options.

The makers of a film from 2016 called Notes on Blindness created an accessibility campaign to accompany their film: they made alternative audio-description soundtracks with different levels of access for users to choose from! That’s the kind of inclusive thinking and action we need!

Maybe one day, captions and subtitles will get their own Oscar category, and the right to and the usability of accessibility measures will be as much a no-brainer as buses that kneel or curb cuts. Fingers crossed, and much work ahead of us.

Thanks so much, Shell, for helping me understand a bit better the complexity around ND and how it applies to captioning. I’m adding some content on it to my course. And if you see other captioning that causes you to pause, please share!

Book Review: The Routledge Handbook of Audiovisual Translation

January 2, 2019January 2, 2019reelwords

Abstract watercolour spheres as decoration of textbook, The Routledge Handbook of Audiovisual Translation Edited by Luis Pérez-González as part of the Routledge Handbooks in Translation and Interpreting Studies series, this new book is textbook material but is still accessible to the nonacademic with an interest in audiovisual translation.

I spent my first two years of university studying translation and linguistics and, in hindsight, now regret not having stayed in that stream. While my work focuses on the end steps of the AVT process (whether subtitles or captions/SDH), I’m still interested in language and how it is not as discrete from the technical production process as most people think. Scholarly work in this area is being taken more seriously as the field has now been accepted as a bona fide academic discipline.

Because they were brought up by so many of the 32 leading scholars who contributed essay-chapters, I’d like to discuss the main themes I noted: changes in technology, obviously, but also inclusion, exclusion, and changes in quality standards (the latter being my favourite aspect, of course).

The book provides some history in terms of subtitles, captions, and translation in cinema and discusses some of the software options currently available. It’s interesting that where Alina Secară’s part (p.139, 141) mentions eyeglass development as a means of caption delivery, even that area is changing quickly as we saw in October 2018 with the National Theatre in London’s introduction of Smart Caption Glasses by Epson. There is also a return (for me) to some concepts I read about in books I reviewed and interviewed authors about, such as Nornes’s thoughts on abusive subtitling (p.460) and Dwyer’s on prosumers (p.442) and the politics of fansubbing.

There seems to be a tension between the inclusion and exclusion that can be found in AVT. As I understand it, inclusion involves the performativity (p.446) and widespread participation by various factions (p.419, 438, 442). Sometimes the work is done by collectives on Viki or Amara, for example, and sometimes by fewer contributors, such as individual YouTubers—whether it’s their own content or someone else’s. The idea of prosumerism is covered not only by Dwyer but also Díaz-Cintas (p.31), Pérez-González (p.31) and Jones (p.187). Dwyer introduced me to the element of play being part of the performativity (p.446), and it took me this second crack at the literature to understand the degree to which AVT not only involves various politics (e.g. participation) but also the economics of the social contracts that are understood in many unofficial or unsanctioned undertakings. Localization straddles the areas of inclusion and exclusion, both as an “act of homage” (p.446) but also a kind of bowdlerization, such as the de-anglicization of text in Harry Potter for an American audience (Guillot on Nornes’s corrupt domestication, p.38).

But all is not warm and fuzzy. There is exclusion that is perhaps inevitable with AVT. In her discussion of music-video fansubbing, Johnson (p.421) cites Pérez-González and the “widespread assumptions of the dominance of English in globalizing process.” Dwyer (p.441) talks about the “global language politics and hierarchies” by netizens or global citizens. In her chapter on AVT and activism, Baker notes that not only fansubbers but also most subtitlers and captioners are not credited, or at least work unappreciated, in anonymity or invisibility (Baker, p.456–57). In my own advocacy efforts, which call for subtitle and caption editing to be recognized by film awards as much as other technical contributions like sound editing, I will give shout outs to excellent translations for film (such as in Les Innocentes, 2016; I can’t find my original post praising the subtitler anymore, so if anyone knows their name, please contact me!). I don’t understand why title designers are front and centre, but the professionals who made the audience’s comprehension of the dialogue accessible aren’t considered worthy of a credit line. Secară (p.138) also quotes Rondin’s discussion of smart glasses as a solution “without interfering with the overall show.” Maybe this is just my politics, but it always sounds like providing caption users with the technology to take part in this cultural content is a pain in the ass and must not disturb the public, such as the public’s general distaste for open captioning, unfortunately supported by a deaf person in a recent piece. From what I hear in Deaf social circles and forums, the expectation isn’t perfection, just something that’s effective (not craptions, for example). Captioning excellence seems like it shouldn’t require advocacy for improvement. It’s not like we accept mediocrity in the latest smartphones. Anyway, that’s a jump I made in my thinking.

Of course, what I was most thrilled by were the chapters where AVT training and teaching are addressed and what the future of quality assurance will involve with legislation. For instance, here, the Accessible Canada Act (ACA) is forthcoming, and the AODA is in place, but my Twitter feed is full of justified complaints by people of all types of disabilities because standards on paper and actual, informed enforcement are not the same thing. Merchán’s chapter (29) about training and McLoughlin’s (30) about teaching and learning made me hopeful. I was thrilled to read about Ken Loach and his rejection of the traditional AVT-as-postproduction model because budgets don’t plan or allow for quality subtitling/captioning, and Liz Crow (p.506) seeing accessibility as integral to the production process rather than a lowly add-on. Pablo Romero-Fresco has a book coming out shortly, Accessible Filmmaking Guide (London, BFI), which I couldn’t be more excited about (and he’s graciously agreed to an interview with me once I’ve read it). Study of filmmaker/subtitler collaboration by the University of Roehampton and programs like the MA in filmmaking at Kingston University (London) addressing accessibility and AVT as par for the course also give me hope. I’m currently trying to impress upon colleges near me the importance of caption editing being taught as a foundational course and program requisite because all the ACAs and equivalents in the world aren’t going to eradicate the problem of craptions (as inaccessibility) if filmmakers aren’t taught the soft skills now. I can’t figure out why more postsecondary institutions aren’t scrambling to implement this, particularly when they advertise accessibility production as one of their training outcomes. Mohawk College’s Accessible Media Production is the only program where I can see the genesis of serious application to this in their curriculum.

I loved the quotation of Marleau from 1982 that Secară concludes her chapter with (p.142)—and here surtitling could easily be replaced by subtitling: “…surtitling and captioning services are not to be regarded as ‘un mal necessaire’ [sic] (‘a necessary evil’).” I’ve attempted to walk the walk in my rhetoric about this and have launched an award for excellence in captioning in the hope that we will raise more Loaches and Crows who will see captioning excellence as one of the foundational stones in the building of a film, and not as a requirement remembered just as the student is about to hit Send. The d/Deaf, hard of hearing, and many other types of caption users are not dismissible, and as I’ve written before, I’m not going to shut up about it. Fortunately, inquiries about the award from filmmakers are heartening: there is will—but also many barriers remain.

Pérez-González’s edited collection of essays by some of the top scholars in audiovisual translation today—for me—is summarized best in Romero-Fresco’s position that AVT services are an afterthought at best. He notes that the United Nations’ ITU Focus Group on Media Accessibility and filmmakers such as Tarantino and Iñárritu are trying to influence, respectively, the profession and the process by being involved in subtitling (p.510). I don’t see change being swift, but I hope that ten years from now we will see improvements in quality via subtitle and caption editing. Meanwhile, The Routledge Handbook of Audiovisual Translation gives the student, academic, professional, and interested lay reader an excellent idea of the lay of the land in AVT. It will be interesting to see what has—and hasn’t—changed in education, standards, and enforcement by the time a second edition is published.

[Reading Sounds]: Interview with Sean Zdenek

September 25, 2018June 23, 2019reelwords

Cover of Sean Zdenek's book: Reading Sounds: Closed Captioned Media and Popular Media. It is an inverted image with a blue and cloudy sky on the bottom half and paved road on the top.

VW: Thank you for agreeing to this interview, Sean! I’m excited to have the opportunity to ask you more about your book, Reading Sounds: Closed-Captioned Media and Popular Culture. I think we agree on a lot of issues about captioning, but your book made me think about some of them differently and, in some cases, more deeply.

For instance, I liked your succinct five guidelines for thinking through the question of significance (pg.123):

1. Captions should support the emotional arc of a text.

2. A sound is significant if it contributes to the purpose of the scene.

3. Caption space is precious. It should never be wasted on superfluous sounds that may confuse viewers or diminish their sense of identification with the protagonist(s).

4. Sounds in the background do not necessarily need to be captioned, even if they are loud.

5. Every caption should honor and respect the narrative. While a narrative does not have one correct reading, it does have a sequence and arc that must be nourished. [All emphases by VW.]

And I think the echo effect you created for the captions from The Three Musketeers (see still image below of captions in a poisoning scene) honoured those points. Actually, I’m going to write an article later about creative captioning which I meant to do before now, and I polled some D/deaf and hearing followers on social media about it (separate polls). Now I’m kind of glad I didn’t get around to that post before reading your book, which made me see them in a more positive light. But more on that in another article!

Video clip of a musketeer collapsed on the floor with a caption that says, Well, just so you don't leave empty-handed, with the text repeated 3 times and overlapping, reflecting his experience of being poisoned

Copyright Sean Zdenek. Do not reproduce.

You may have seen my interview with Tessa Dwyer about her book, Speaking in Subtitles: Revaluing Screen Translation, and I was interested to see a political discussion in your book, too: linguistic imperialism, or the idea that “only English matters” (pg.271). Jon Christian’s outing of Netflix a few years ago started off a more frequent public discussion about captions on VODs and in broadcasting; more recently we’ve had Karamo Brown’s calling out Netflix on Twitter about wanting intralingual verbatim captioning and that got some coverage recently. What’s your POV on what’s happening to the online discussion these days around captioning?

SZ: As you’ll recall, it wasn’t too long ago—circa 2010—when Hulu and Netflix were scrambling to offer any captioning at all on their streaming content. The National Association of the Deaf filed a lawsuit, which was settled in 2012 when Netflix “agreed to caption all of its shows by the year 2014” (Mullin 2012). Around the same time, Hulu was only captioning about 5 percent of its online programming. I wrote a blog post in 2009 to call attention to the small percentage of captioned programs on Hulu and to show my support for what would become the “21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act” (CVAA), signed into law by President Obama in 2010. The CVAA “requires video programming that is closed captioned on TV to be closed captioned when distributed on the Internet (does not cover programs shown only on the Internet).”

Autocaptioning, which Google debuted in 2009, is an important part of the history of online captioning, too. It has received some well-deserved criticism over the years but also, more recently, some praise as it continues to improve and evolve. (See Rikki Poynter’s 2018 blog post, Are automatic captions on YouTube getting better?) No doubt the ubiquity of autocaptioning on YouTube, despite (or because of) its limitations, has been crucial in shaping the public’s understanding of good and bad captioning.

Today, digital captioning is having its viral moment, finally. The best example: Nyle DiMarco wrote a series of tweets in February 2018 following a bad experience with movie theater captioning. His story was picked up by a number of news outlets and written up as an op-ed for Teen Vogue. Other popular writers and bloggers, including Ace Ratcliff and Rikki Poynter, have called attention to access barriers and problems with captioning.

VW: Yes, I was interviewed on CBC Radio One’s Metro Morning show about open captioning [transcript here], and the conversation began with the host talking about Nyle’s tweets: his reach was international!

SZ: What we’re seeing with these stories, I think, is the power of social media to elevate to viral status the needs of people who require quality captioning. We’re seeing captioning break into the mainstream in ways it hasn’t before. Popular personalities (celebrities, models, YouTube bloggers) are driving compelling stories that seem tailor-made for viral media.

The online landscape has changed radically in the last decade too. Video rules the web. By 2021, according to Cisco’s projections, most internet traffic—from 80 to 90 percent—will be video, “up from 73 percent in 2016” (Cisco 2017). Netflix alone is responsible for more than one-third of all internet traffic in North America (Luckerson 2015). A decade ago, online captioning was a technical problem to be solved. Today, viewers demand quality captioning and lean on the power of social media to call out instances of poor captioning.

VW: I’ve shared with you that my in-house captioning experience was eye-opening on several levels. In Canada, even with the upcoming AODA in Ontario, the on-paper standards are basically moot, and as you say, it does seem like CCs are provided to “placate government requirements” (pg.xv) and that they’re seen as “mandatory…as a condition” (pg.80) of broadcasting. Even in accessible projects, captions do indeed seem to be added on at the end “after the real work has been completed” (pg.291). There’s only one full post-secondary study program in accessible media production in Canada, at Mohawk College, that addresses captioning, although I see other schools starting to pick up the idea. You mention hoping CCs will be addressed in the scholarly realm more frequently and seriously. What’s the state of captioning studies as a discipline or even a program in the US? Because, as you say, there is a lot of power and responsibility in the hands of captioners (pg.53), but that’s pretty scary when production isn’t regulated and the craft isn’t even fully taught!

SZ: Academic interest in captioning continues to grow, especially in the humanities. I think the biggest hurdle, from the humanities side, is that captioning has usually been viewed as purely technical or objective, a useful skill or trade but not a complex array of theories or deeper questions of meaning and user experiences. When I refer to caption studies, I intend to link the study of captioning to other humanistic pursuits in writing studies, sound studies, graphic design, art, accessibility, universal design, rhetoric, and more. In fact, I would argue that captioning unites these disparate areas and offers the perfect laboratory for studying questions of digital access across multiple fields of inquiry. A small number of scholars in my own fields of rhetoric and professional writing have taken up the subject of captioning, often in the name of disability studies, which has grown into a vibrant, interdisciplinary research program.

The term caption studies is performative: it doesn’t really exist (yet), but I was hoping to bring it into being in the act of naming it. In my opinion, we need a label that reflects the complexity of the subject itself, one that also aligns with the humanistic inquiry that is at the heart of other studies (e.g. sound studies, gender studies, science studies, etc.). Names matter, of course, which is why I prefer captioner to captionist: the latter sounds too much like typist or transcriptionist (with connotations of direct copying), while the former sounds like (or invokes) writer (with all the agency and creativity that being a writer entails).

VW: Exactly where I’m at with caption and subtitle editing! I’m trying to raise awareness that just as books don’t just get published as written and editors are integral to the publishing process, so to must caption editing be part of production. Someone summarized my work the other day as “fixing typos,” and I was quick to point out that editing is not just proofreading. It’s a craft, science, and art rolled into one that I’m trying to shed light on because until now it’s been ignored, or at least underserved by so-called quality control. I often make about 150 edits to 60 runtime minutes captioned by a professional captioner or subtitler, not because they aren’t good at their job, but because they’re like book authors and my making the text more clear and correct for the user’s full immersion in the content is a separate skill set. Most of the captioners and subtitlers I work with get this and thank me for what I bring to the edited timed text. Sounds like we both have an opportunity to show the academic and lay worlds that captioning is a humanistic study, as you say, and the holistic, performative aspect goes way beyond avoiding the popular #CraptionFails we see posted online.

SZ: I’m currently teaching an undergraduate course called Web Access for All this semester. It covers several topics, one of which is captioning. As far as I know, it’s the first and only course of its kind at my university. It complements other courses and programs in interactive media, professional writing, and disability studies. But by no means is caption studies a formal program of study in higher education. One way to get there, I think, is to fold the study of captioning into courses on digital access or multimedia design, and then fold those courses into disability studies minors.

Academics and practitioners also need to work together. I’m fascinated by the important work that captioners do but have never worked as a professional captioner. I’ve interviewed captioners but have never observed captioners at work. A full-bodied program of study would support collaborations among multidisciplinary teams of researchers and practitioners from academia and industry. Workplace studies of captioners are vital if we want to call attention to the forms of labor and creativity that captioners provide.

VW: They’re also vital to demonstrate to captioning houses, departments and companies that how they’re supposedly training people doesn’t work. It’s not just about being a fast typist, and you can’t be a good captioner with baptism by fire. It’s got to be taught—as in pedagogy—with a view that goes beyond having a facility with subtitling software functionalities. Like writing and editing courses.

You correctly discuss how producers don’t work with captioners (pg.77) and that there’s a disconnect between producers and captioners (pg.290). My experience is that we’re definitely an add-on and that the only feedback is about frames and other technical elements. Whether subtitles or captions, I really think production houses just don’t understand the nuances of captioning (see above) and are just concerned with getting out quick and cheap CCs to meet requirements. It’s kind of depressing sometimes! Do you have more you can add about this that didn’t make it into your book?

SZ: For me, the problem was summarized nicely in an email I received in 2012 from a professional captioner as I was beginning to work on my book. Her email (which I posted anonymously on my blog with her permission) was full of provocative claims:

The main factor that drives quality captioning is what clients are willing to pay for it.
Most clients see captioning as that mandatory last step that has to get done as a condition of their materials going on air.
The vast majority of clients do not care what the captioning looks like, as long as it gets done in time for the stations to receive their captioned masters.
Clients will often choose to go to cheaper captioning houses who promise to get their feature film captioned in a day.
When a captioning company charges low prices on high volumes of work, it’s because they hire lots of people at low wages. [All emphases by VW.]

It’s hard to imagine a collection of more depressing claims for captioning advocates. I’d be curious to get your take on them. It’s also difficult for me to imagine a harder problem to solve in caption studies.

VW: This is my experience completely, and I see it echoed on closed social media groups for captioners everyday. I also hired one of those cute-kitty-typing-ad captioning services to double check the reality. I sent in a one-minute video and the caption file came back inaccurate!

That’s largely why I’m turning to the nudge paradigm with an initiative that will be announced shortly. I just don’t think that 30 years of demands for accessibility has worked: there’s some progress in quantity but not quality. I think it needs to start with a change of view and attitude in filmmakers, since they’re where everything starts. But more on that later…

SZ: Carefully and creatively subtitled films do give me some hope. The English subtitles in Night Watch, for example, were produced under the director’s supervision. As I wrote about the film in a blog post:

In an unusual move, director Timur Bekmambetov “insisted on subtitling [Night Watch] and took charge of the design process himself,” as opposed to having the Russian speech dubbed into English or leaving the subtitling process to an outside company (Rawsthorn 2007). He adopted an innovative approach: “We thought of the subtitles as another character in the film, another way to tell the story” (Rosenberg 2007).

Several subtitles in this movie are painstakingly integrated into the aesthetic of the film. They reinforce meaning and mood by blending form and content. Meaning is expressed not only through the words but how they are visually designed (color, movement, dimensionality, transformation). When objects temporarily cover or block the subtitles, we are reminded that the subtitles are part of the scene itself (instead of an add-on or afterthought).

VW: This makes me teary-eyed…

SZ: Night Watch inspired me to explore non-traditional forms of captioning. My experiments with color, icons, typography, and effects were intended to be disruptive and controversial. But I think we need to push against conventions that are limiting and constraining. I published seventeen of my experiments as an online journal article entitled “Designing Captions: Disruptive Experiments with Typography, Color, Icons, and Effects.”

VW: Dear readers, the fact that you’re reading this interview means that you will find “Designing Captions” fascinating. And Sean, I’ll have to check out Night Watch! Whenever I see a show or film with excellent captioning, I always get on my social media soapbox and sing their praises. It’s so rare that filmmakers a) get it or b) care.

As that captioner said to you, in terms of value, “quality is what clients are willing to pay for it” (pg.80) which, depending on the genre or product type, is next to nothing. That was my experience in-house—most of my training cohort quit because it wasn’t a livable or predictable wage, more suited to students wanting part-time work who could drop everything and show up last minute (we stayed in touch and discussed our takes on it). Even now, I get inquiries about rates from filmmakers who’ve been told that they need captions in order to submit their projects for consideration in film festivals, and they balk at professional (not exorbitant) rates. I’m always banging the drum about filmmakers needing to plan for this minuscule percentage of their overall budget so that it’s not an unexpected submission issue… Aside from educating the content producers and production houses, how else do you think we can create a shift in thinking about the need for excellent captions (not just “good enough” ones) and the potential increase in distribution and profits by making them accessible to another 10+ per cent of the population (D/deaf/HoH/other folks who need accessibility)? My upcoming initiative aside, that is.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the entertainment industry is rooted in ableism.

SZ: You’re asking the hardest question of all. Advocates and organizations have worked tirelessly on behalf of individuals who need quality captioning. So many of us care deeply about captioning. It does feel, at times, as though the message isn’t breaking through.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the entertainment industry is rooted in ableism. Movies are made for people who can hear and see—it’s as simple as that. Stories about inaccessible, or accessible but not usable, movie theater captions remind us that movie producers are not really thinking about the needs of people who are deaf or hard of hearing. They are satisfying legal requirements and, in most cases, doing the bare minimum at a fraction of the movie’s budget. Captions come last because, to be frank, the needs of people with disabilities have historically come last (or not at all).

VW: Which is why I’ve been handwriting letters to directors and producers for quite a while now to ask them to be more engaged in the production and use of captions so that more people can watch their films; just because captions are made for bigger films doesn’t mean they’re well done, and usually the caption files are shelved because the cinemas claim no demand for them. So far, no one has replied, which is really depressing.

SZ: How do we “create a shift in thinking about the need for excellent captions”? I think we need to continue to write about and advocate for quality captioning from our diverse positions of expertise, as you have obviously been doing. Teachers can do their part in training new generations of accessibility-minded producers and consumers. As an educator, I teach my students about captioning and place accessibility at the center of digital design. I also advocate for digital inclusion on my campus. Promoting accessibility is one way for academics to speak to people outside of their narrow scholarly fields who will go on to work in many industries (including the entertainment industry).

VW: I agree. I write about it and I’m seeing an uptick in people in more countries, like Tweeters @deafieblogger, @lifeanddeafpost, @Limping_Chicken, as well as advocacy groups I’m a member of or in touch with, like CCAC and DC Deaf Moviegoers. I did write a speculative piece about how one day we’ll look back at this time of ridiculous exclusivity; I hope you and I are eventually proven right that advocacy will change the landscape.

Even in my work with my clients (who clearly do care about quality as they pay me to edit them, not just review them for typos), the attempt to keep things consistent within a series with a bible I’ll create for the captioners and implementation of extended style guidelines (I model mine on CMoS, too, (pg.161, 162) can still get ignored if I don’t advocate for change with explanations as to how it aids the users.

Even the oft-recommended resources are “lite” in scope and imperfect. (The Captioning Key, for instance, has at least one self-contradictory error that I can recall off the top of my head.) Do you agree with my position that, after 30 years, it’s time for an overhaul of outdated bits and pieces (language has changed since the 80s!) and for the creation of a robust and standardized “CMoS for captioning”?

SZ: Yes, I agree completely. The publicly available captioning style guides need work. I reviewed four style manuals for my book. It was challenging to try to reconcile and justify the differences among them. But more importantly, it wasn’t clear to me why some of the guidelines existed at all. Guidelines are usually offered up as facts with little justification in terms of usability and users’ preferences. For example, guidelines for styling speaker identifiers are conflicting. Do we put parentheses around names and place them on their own line? Or do we set names in all caps and use colons (which is standard in DVD captioning)? Why should we choose one or the other—the style guides are silent on this question. WGBH’s Media Access Group suggests styling speaker identifiers in all caps, but then presents an opposite example:

The Media Access Group’s convention is to show IDs in uppercase, rendered in Roman and set off with a colon. Parentheses or brackets may also be considered. For example, a bottom-center caption with an ID might look like this:

Narrator:
THE RIVERS RAN DRY
WITH DEVASTATING EFFECTS.

Guidelines like this one not only need to be corrected (so the example supports the guideline) but reconsidered entirely. A “robust and standardized” style manual would need to be deeply informed by user studies (focus groups, surveys, eye tracking) and theories of reading, typography, design, and perception.

A related issue is that captioning itself is often assumed to be simple—a matter of transcribing (narrowly defined) or copying down what people are saying. The online DIY tools are built for speed to allow users to quickly transcribe speech. But these tools can reinforce the idea that style manuals are not needed because captioning is straightforward.

VW: This brings to mind the guy who called me “simplistic” in response to my article, “Good Enough” Captions Aren’t. He was all about the tools, speed, and ease of application, and I think he felt threatened by the position I take.

I couldn’t agree more with your comments about who makes a good captioner. Just as book editors (my other hat) must be well-read, well-educated, and professionally trained in editing best practices, I think captioners do need to be mature individuals with a wide knowledge base and extensive cultural literacy (pgs. 22, 73, 221, 235). I was recently asked why I had sent back an edit to an experienced subtitler with a particular sentence put into quotation marks; in the narration, it was an unattributed quote, but because the person wasn’t of the age or background to at least twig that something had a different register and perhaps should be investigated, it had gone over their head. I’m not blaming them, but it just highlights the need for a certain type or age of person from the workforce—or at least, it validates my insistence that captions and subtitles need an editor. But sadly, typing speed and facility with software are what create the poor results from freelance-marketplace lowballers who are willing to transcribe for pennies. Aside from style standardization and formalization of training, how will we be able to create an understanding that captioning is a skilled profession requiring education (and perhaps accreditation) and to get away from untrained people banging out craptions?

SZ: You’ve raised another excellent question. I don’t have any easy answers. I think we can continue to chip away at people’s expectations and assumptions about captioning (and about access more broadly). Above, I mentioned educating the public, both formally (in our classrooms) and informally (through blog posts, social media, interactions with clients). I am hopeful that our college courses—even when they are not focused on training captioners or even captioning per se—can create lifelong advocates for digital inclusion. More students than ever are being introduced to digital accessibility and universal design. My hope is that they will take their knowledge into their future workplaces and teach others about the value and importance of video access for all.

I hoped to be able to turn some readers into captioning and access advocates. Several have told me that they will “never look at captions the same way again.”

We can also continue to research captions and user experiences to disrupt the status quo. With Reading Sounds, I set out to show that captioning is much more complex, rhetorical, subjective, creative, and interesting than we have typically assumed. I had in mind a diverse audience (not just scholars in my own fields) because I hoped that the book’s message might resonate with students, film fans, and others who may not be connected directly to captioning. In other words, I hoped to be able to turn some readers into captioning and access advocates. Several people have told me after reading my book or attending one of my presentations that they will “never look at captions the same way again.” If we can find ways to get this message into the minds of more people, including movie producers, perhaps we can chip away at the assumption that the subject couldn’t possibly be rich enough to support a book-length treatment, that captioning is not a profession but a simple skill, that captioning only benefits a few people, and so on.

VW: That’s why I wanted to spotlight your book with an interview. It is not only accessible but fascinating and thought-provoking reading for anyone, not just academia. I think I’ve told you that if I ever get to teach a course in caption editing, it’s going to be required reading.

The feedback from the caption users you surveyed did not surprise me. They struggled with having to rethink content in bad captions (pg.67) and expressed a need and appreciation for excellent captions (pg.71), which reflects my articles and guest writers’ experiences. You’re open about your son being deaf and your subsequent interest in captions; I now rely on them due to the hearing conditions that affect my hearing. Do you think, with seemingly international pressure to legislate accessibility (despite my letters to Hollywood!), that all the different types of caption users, but especially the D/deaf/HoH, will ever see true access—and by that I mean high-quality captioning? It’s been three decades already with increased application but stagnant quality. What’s it going to take til craptions are basically a thing of the past?

SZ: The number of people who need or want quality captioning only seems to be increasing as the population ages. In an era of streaming global media, more people are reading movies as well. Netflix has introduced more viewers to the pleasures and challenges of watching foreign movies with subtitles and/or with dubbed speech. (Whereas dubbing is well-known to European audiences, it is not common in the US.) Media globalization is helping to normalize words on the screen for US audiences.

Universal design has also produced powerful arguments in favor of quality captioning for all. We know the claims and contexts so well by now that they’ve become stereotypes: watching TV in a noisy bar, studying a video lecture in a quiet library (without headphones), learning to read a first language (child) or a second language (adult), and on and on. Even nonhumans rely on captions: Google uses caption data to index the content of videos on YouTube, “but only if you upload your own professional captions. If you use the auto-generated captions that YouTube provides, they won’t be indexed because the quality tends to be very poor” (Dillman 2017). Another reason why autocaptioning is insufficient!

These developments do not eliminate craptions, but they do make captions and subtitles more visible, needed, and expected. As more users encounter and demand quality captions in more contexts, the calls for quality captioning will hopefully become more frequent and persuasive.

VW: There are so many topics you covered that I don’t think are considered even by current advocates: captioned irony; treatment of silences; nonspeech information; continue captions. And I learned a new term: captioned modulation (pg.200). Thank you for such a broad introduction to captioning theory and practice. I hope by the time your next book comes out (), rhetoric will have moved out of accessibility-focused circles and into the mainstream as a career option to fill a need and is given more than lip service. I’d love nothing more than to not have material for [intensifies], [indistinct conversations], and [music] craption memes!

Sean Zdenek is associate professor of technical and professional writing at the University of Delaware. His research interests include web accessibility, disability studies, sound studies, and rhetorical theory and criticism. Prior to joining the Department of English in 2017, Dr. Zdenek was a faculty member at Texas Tech University for fourteen years, where he taught undergraduate and graduate courses on a range of subjects. Dr. Zdenek's book, Reading Sounds: Closed-Captioned Media and Popular Culture (University of Chicago Press), received the 2017 best book award in technical or scientific communication from the Conference on College Composition and Communication (4Cs).

Vanessa will be speaking October 15–16 at #a11yTOConf on caption editing for accessibility. The title of her presentation is [dog barking in distance].

Interview: Tessa Dwyer, author of Speaking in Subtitles: Revaluing Screen Translation

May 21, 2018August 9, 2018reelwords

Cover of Speaking in Subtitles: Revaluing Screen Translation by Dr. Tessa Dwyer, showeing a film still of a young Asian couple in a dramatic setup, with the subtitle, "There's something I haven't told you yet."

RW: Hi, Tessa! Thank you for agreeing to this interview. I found your book Speaking in Subtitles: Revaluing Screen Translation very timely, and it provoked many questions and some new thinking for me.

I started my university studies in translation, but I was surprised to learn about “value politics” in translation, which certainly wasn’t something I heard about 35 years ago. Could you provide a sort of elevator-pitch definition for readers?

TD: Perhaps because I come from a different disciplinary background – Film and Screen Studies – the “value politics” of translation immediately stood out to me when I started to engage with intercultural viewing practices and, especially, subtitling and dubbing. In fact, it was an encounter with “value politics” that really sparked my sustained interest in the topic. I was writing about Hong Kong action films in my MA thesis, using some French critical theory. My supervisor suggested I read the French theory in the “original,” yet had no qualms about my viewing of subtitled Hong Kong action films. Obviously, there are hierarchies in place about when and why translation does, or doesn’t, matter. What I found ironic was that a very learned translation of a French theorist by someone with expert knowledge of the field was not deemed worthy of serious analysis, while the less than stringent (to say the least!) subtitling of the Hong Kong film industry flew completely under the radar.

In Film and Screen Studies – especially Anglophone film theory – translation is so undervalued and un-theorised that it is almost entirely invisible. Despite the canonical centrality of European filmmaking, for instance, in the development of film theory and culture, the role of translation and the inter-cultural basis of much theorisation is almost entirely ignored. Translation speaks to reception contexts, over those of production/creation, and for this reason, it is often regarded as utterly inconsequential or, worse, as an affront to the creative process and to authorial vision. In this way, translation threatens the core stakes upon which so much of film and screen culture remains invested. That, I guess, it why I find it so fascinating and why I love how translation can demonstrate in myriad ways how the very distinction between production and reception breaks down. Everyday practices of subtitling and dubbing can really challenge so many assumptions and biases in the way we understand and discuss film and screen.

So much for an elevator pitch!... more like a meandering rumination.

RW: That’s great: all helpful!

You discuss critiques of subtitles which include elitism. Do you think wider access to film and video through prevalent video-on-demand streaming services is reducing this problem, which perhaps was more of an art-house issue for foreign films in the past?

TD: This is certainly something to consider. The disruptive influence of streaming platforms is immense, and as I argue in the book, the global media flows enabled by online networking are affected, at every turn, by language difference and translation. These recent industry shifts really bring issues of translation to the forefront of our changing media landscape. So yes, I think that streaming services are set to impact significantly on attitudes to subtitling and dubbing, yet it is too early to tell how this will play out. In 2014, there were predictions that Netflix would cause the demise of dubbing within Europe by providing timely access to content in its original language. However, by 2018, Netflix was streaming dubbed versions of shows by default, claiming that even when audiences insist they prefer subtitling, dubbing keeps more people watching.

RW: You cover issues around translation studies in your book, and current focus on content accessibility has certainly made this area more important than ever. Do you see audio-visual studies increasing in popularity, either as a result of demands for accessibility or because of the globalization of video content (VODs, gaming, etc.)?

TD: Yes, as I mentioned above, I think that the advent of streaming services is increasing attention exponentially on screen translation and localisation (including fan translation and crowdsourcing) and hence, burgeoning areas of research are emerging within Translation Studies. Content accessibility is definitely on the agenda in terms of industry regulation and policy, while global streaming services are having to prioritise translation and localisation. In 2017, for instance, Netflix launched the custom-built HERMES subtitling and translation test and indexing system, which it claims will allow them to “resource quality at scale” through standardised testing and unique identifiers, enabling it to use “metrics in concert with other innovations to ‘recommend’ the best subtitler for specific work based on their past performance.”

RW: Cultural misappropriation in the arts is a hot topic at the moment. Can you share some advice for young or emerging filmmakers, who might be trying to be more creative in order to get a foothold and visibility in a noisy film climate, about how and why to avoid détourning?

TD: Well, I think cultural misappropriation is an ongoing (perhaps necessary) risk attached to many forms of intercultural communication and creation. Détournement was a radical, activist strategy that sought to upset boundaries and challenge modes of thought and politics. It didn’t shy away from cultural misappropriation, but rather, confronted it head-on. It set out to offend and to shock. My take on all this is that intercultural modes of production and reception are vital, essential elements of mediatisation – no matter how risky. We need to recognise this and consider the complexities of translation involved in everyday practices and modes of engagement. I would rather that misappropriation continue to surface as an issue, than that creatives simply avoid engaging beyond their own safe cultural borders and boundaries.

RW: You talk about abusive and corruptive translation and quote Derrida about translation: “... it necessarily violates even as it devotedly follows or respects the original.” As a copy editor of books, I find my profession needs to walk a fine line between being “at once violent and faithful” in helping but also maintaining the author’s voice. “Nornes locates translation abuse within populist practices like anime fansubbing.” I feel the same way about self-publishers who think Grammarly can replace professional editing or who just want to ignore all writing conventions in the name of creativity. But your book seems to make a reasonable, unemotional examination of fansubbing. You changed my black-and-white thinking about it—well, brought my righteous indignation down a notch or two! Just as editors should not encourage grammar policing, what can you say to people who really bristle at fansubbing?

Let’s start with a provocation: maybe translation is, at heart, a fan activity?

TD: Let’s start with a provocation: maybe translation is, at heart, a fan activity? What motivates someone to labour so intensively and minutely with another’s text or creative work, if not some form of respect, devotion or fandom? Of course, the professionalization of the industry means that naturally many translators now routinely labour on works they do not love in any sense, but if we try to think about the origins of the practice, in scholarly and religious contexts say, the fan sense of investment holds.

Speaking from outside the field of professional translation – without the need to defend my own territory – I think it’s easier for me to appreciate the creative and sometimes subversive nature of fansubbing. Also, I’m interested in what fansubbing shows us about global media industries broadly. Fansubbing alerts us to very interesting things that are happening within global media flows, articulating gaps and loopholes, challenging politics, re-purposing technologies and, in some ways, helping to shape the future of global media industries.

Fansubbing is thought to have begun in the US when TV networks stopped broadcasting anime titles like Astroboy and Gigantor. Fans simply went in search of content themselves (sourcing video tapes directly from Japan or Hawaii), which then needed to be translated. As they set about translating for themselves, they discovered the extent of cultural adaptation/appropriation and reworking involved in the US TV broadcasts, and came to see their own translations as more faithful and authentic, and ultimately as safe-guarding the texts. This history is important as it shows how professionalism is by no means a guarantee of quality, due to corporate agendas, industry conventions, cultural attitudes and others factors.

Also – I should mention that many professional audiovisual translators are themselves very interested in fansubbing, and feel that there are many lesson to be learnt. Minako O’Hagen, for instance, notes the benefits of collaborative, peer-to-peer working environments with in-built feedback and mentoring mechanisms. O’Hagen and others also point to the value of expert genre knowledge as something that the industry is learning from the example of fansubbing. Netflix’s Hermes tool is a case in point: the aim is to match the right translator with the right content.

... we should value, not fear, fansubbing...

One of the major reasons why we should value, not fear, fansubbing is due to the fact that many language communities around the world are underserved by online offerings and by professional translation. Collaborative fansubbing provides a means to do something about the inequalities that persist in online modes of screen media access. While Netflix has expanded into 190 (out of 195) countries across the world, it only supports around 20 languages. The Netflix Vietnam service, for instance, offers a very limited range of Vietnamese-subtitled content, and so, once again, viewers resort to fansubs, using websites like subscene.com.

RW: Some people might be surprised to learn about subversive and spontaneous translation of films by audience members; online, I recently learned about lektoring. These brought to mind my days watching shadow-cast performances at The Rocky Horror Picture Show! You also talk about the “participatory” nature of today’s popular and public realms in the area of media consumption. Recently, an article I had posted, about the “good enough” attitude to captions being unacceptable particularly in terms of accessibility, was criticized by a competitor as being too simplistic. I know your book focuses on debates around translation in subtitles, but what’s your opinion on accepting a “good enough” level of captioning? (And you don’t have to agree with me. )

TD: I think it’s always important to advocate for high standards in captioning and other forms of media translation – especially in relation to policy guidelines and regulations. Yes, “good enough” is not an attitude that industry bodies should take on board, nor translation professionals. And yet, I would never want to dismiss the efforts of amateur, volunteer and community translators, who largely labour at the task of translation in response to industry gaps. I agree whole-heartedly that machine translation can never substitute for human translation and perhaps streaming platforms like YouTube that offer automatic captioning tools are creating such a misconception. The fact that captioning is often unedited is indeed a sign of discrimination and shows a lack of commitment by governments and media industries. It’s an important issue, and one that I think fansubbing and DIY captioning can actually aid. The battle isn’t against amateurs lending a hand where they can – it’s about governments and corporations avoiding their responsibilities and obligations. This is largely what fansubbers are also battling against: lack of access. So why not join forces and get fansubbers to champion the cause and help advocate for change? (n.b. Viki did this when it joined with deaf actor Marlee Matlin in the Billion Words March campaign.)

RW: If I ever teach a course on caption and subtitle editing, Speaking in Subtitles is going to be one of the books on my required reading list, and it really should be a staple on cinema studies intro courses. Although it’s academic, it’s packed with interesting information for general readers that will open their eyes to subtitling and captioning issues that go way beyond craptions and typos: literacy, ethics, politics, media piracy and guerilla efforts, cultural capital, interactivity, quality control, “thick translation” and User Generated Content, massively open translation, CT3—community, collaborative and crowdsourced translation, and Viki. Even the term animé is demystified. And thank you for setting us straight on the word for @#$%&! to represent prohibited expletives: grawlixes or “obscenicons” (Dwyer, pg 120; Díaz Cintas, pg 13). Finally, you’ve provided me with the terminology I needed for a future article I’ll be posting about more creative applications of captions: “integrated subtitles.”

Is there anything else you’d like to share? Perhaps something that didn’t make it into this book?

TD: I’ve published recently on barrage cinema in China (where viewers text comment onto the movie screen) – which relates tangentially to subtitling as a text-on-image mode! I’m also developing a fansubbing project around an in-production Spanish-language web-series called Distancia (watch the trailer here).

RW: I love the discussions around language and vocabulary in the barrage cinema article (“assault,” “bullet subtitles,” “hecklevision”!), and I'll keep an eye open about Distancia. Thank you again, Tessa!

TD: Thanks so much for this positive feedback. It’s truly gratifying to hear that you have found something of value in my book (despite its occasional forays into academic abstraction), and that it even has use for someone working in the industry. I really appreciate your thoughtful comments and enquiries and look forward to catching your next post. So, the pleasure is all mine – thank you!

Headshot of Dr. Tessa Dwyer Dr. Tessa Dwyer is a Lecturer in Film and Screen Studies. Prior to arriving at Monash, she taught Screen and Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne, and worked as a researcher at the Swinburne Institute for Social Research, Swinburne University. Tessa is a member of the inter-disciplinary research group Eye Tracking the Moving Image (ETMI) and president of the journal Senses of Cinema (www.sensesofcinema.org).

Tessa’s research focuses on screen translation, language difference and transnational reception and distribution practices. She holds an Honours and MA degree in Fine Arts (Film) from the University of Melbourne, and a PhD in Screen and Media Culture, also from the University of Melbourne.

Dear VODs: Stop Blindfolding Deaf People!

April 3, 2018April 3, 2018reelwords

Close-up of CC #NoMoreCraptions button. CC logo in black and white on button, pinned to black leather bag. VWells image of Rikki Poynter button.

I often can’t hear sound effects in shows and movies, so I use captions so as not to miss anything. Because I mostly use Netflix to stream (I don’t have a TV; I sometimes rent/borrow DVDs), I was curious to know how other VODs (video on demand [streaming] services) fared in the application of and care taken with subtitles and captions. It’s not just the D/deaf/hard of hearing who use captions for same-language film and video, and access to global programming is making good subtitling a must more than ever.

This is my survey of captions and subtitles on some common VODs. As in my survey of cinema access for the D/deaf in Toronto, when I contacted these companies about problems I was transparent, with Reel Words info in the email signature. I also approached this as an everyday user. Where necessary, I paid out of pocket to get the services. I’ve assigned a star rating system for overall application and treatment of captions/subtitles.

D/deaf people who sign have the right not to have their hands and arms restrained because it prevents them from communicating. What I discovered is that these providers might as well be blindfolding the D/deaf/hard of hearing. They can’t see the content that isn’t provided for them.

Google Play ★

I had heard that The Silent Child (2017) was on Google Play for $2.99, and I obviously wanted to see it for the storyline and use of ASL. It turned out the film could only be placed on a wish list for when it was made available on Google Play in the future. YouTube Movies says it is not available there.

I searched for some free movies and tripped upon the sociologically fascinating (although perhaps not intentionally…)The Creators, made “in conjunction with YouTube” and boy, did that ever show!

It was a sort of advertorial documentary about young YouTube phenoms in the UK making their living through that platform, all with different…talents. Here are two I’d never heard of, Niki and Sammy, branded online as NikiNSammy. Not quite sure what their talent was aside from having sprung from the same egg, but let’s focus on the captions as they were used throughout the doc. Here’s an example of YouTube’s idea of accessibility:

Young adult twins side by side, incomplete captions are And that's really; Which is amazing — Screenshot from The Creators on Google Play

NikiNSammy’s captions were split, both left-aligned (which is not helpful for twins…) and these two titles containing 36 characters was only up for one second. Now, the most current Netflix guideline is 20 characters per second. While it was a UK-filmed short doc, the spelling used was both British and American. The worst offence was that it seemed they really did use YouTube automatic captioning because there were constant errors, such as captioning react for interact and real for raw. The caption bands jumped all over the screen, as if placed for the cool factor—with absolutely no understanding of what captions (CCs) are intended for. A professional titler was not employed, and no QC person could have reviewed it. Clearly the producers didn’t give a hoot about accessibility. Thoroughly appalled at Google/YouTube.

Amazon Prime Video ★★

The Silent Child wasn’t listed on amazon.ca’s Prime Video.

So I decided to take the 30-day free trial to watch another example and promptly cancelled to avoid the $79CAD/yr fee.

I decided to go with Robin Hood (Ridley Scott, 2010), a choice influenced rather arbitrarily by my recent participation at an axe-, knife- and archery-target place. I wasn’t sure if the captions used were made for this stream or were from a previous production and distribution. As is common, the captioner was not credited.

The font was crisp white on black below the screen or with a shaded dark band for a top line placed above that on the film. But there were great inconsistencies: [ALL SCREAMING] vs only [CHEERING] when all were cheering; poor and inconsistently styled offscreen speaker IDs; poor choices in deciding on the most relevant sound effects, such as dogs barking but not men yelling in attacks or falling off walls; the King of France (should be king if not using a personal name); Jimmy boy as a name (should be Jimmy-boy or Jimmy Boy). In short, the usual problems that I see constantly on Netflix. Visually accessible but not textually accessible, which is a huge part of the game! As I often comment, unedited titles cause reader stumbles, which cause the user to lose concentration and thus comprehension.

Group shot of warriors and brigands under a tent at night. Caption: When you had us herd 2,500 Muslim men, women, and children together, (incomplete) — Screenshot from Robin Hood (Ridley Scott version) on Amazon Prime Video (amazon.ca)

Here, two and a half thousand should have been used, but space was tight; however, space could have been made by forcing an earlier and split title. Not great, but Russell Crowe did not say “twenty-five hundred.”

Good points: the ability to rewind OR fast forward by 10 seconds, and three subtitle format options (the fourth was black on black…).

Netflix ★★

Netflix’s captions and subtitles were the raison d’être for this survey. I was curious to know if other VODs were as ineffective and disregarding of Deaf/HoH needs as Netflix. (You can read a lot about my feelings on Netflix on my website on the blog tab and see various #CraptionFails on the Gallery of Fails tab.) No point in repeating it all here, but suffice it to say that despite (or perhaps because of) having the monopoly on VOD, this machine has grown too big to have serious quality control of captions and subtitles. The failure of the Hermes Test, the lack of qualified QC (“Master-Level Quality Control”) editors, and the low pay leave it just a step above YouTube craptions. Really and inconsistently poor. I’ve only had about four or five examples in my portfolio of well-done captions with this provider. See my website and blog posts for many illustrated examples of the problems and how they should have been avoided.

Sundance Now 1/2★*

This check started with a series of emails to customer service because I couldn’t find the CC/ST button on the interface for some movies I wanted to review. Also, the overall platform is clumsy and annoying to navigate; the only good point is the ability to rewind 10 seconds but—unlike Amazon Prime—there’s no option to fast forward by increments.

The customer service rep kept insisting they were there if only I would use a supporting device and look in the right place, but they weren’t. His final email said in part: “I checked Off the Rails and Julia, and unfortunately we don’t have captions available on those two titles right now—- [sic] while the majority of our content is now captioned, we’re still working on updating our catalog.” Now this may be true. I didn’t check all of their catalogue. But my random selections of movies did not have captions.

Incidentally, I used the search box to find films with the keyword deaf and was provided with 13 suggestions on death content.

The usual problems with missing words, wrong words (Yeah for Yes) and letters, speaker IDs, punctuation. Overall it was very sluggish. Read: inaccessible. Note these captions, all of which lagged, from Broken Flowers (2005) with a terrible line break.

Exterior shot, two men speaking seriously. Captioned A few years ago now, mate; Yeah, well, you'd hope so; She's dead you (incomplete) — Screenshot from Broken Flowers on Sundance Now

The worst part was that, no, I didn’t read all 17 pages of the Terms and Conditions. I had stopped at the part that says [sic]: “7 day free trial, you can cancel anytime” which, due to the lack of copy editing, I read as you had seven days free and you could cancel anytime. NOPE. $59.00 down the tube. You can “cancel” your subscription but you’re free to watch for the rest of the year. In other words, you’ve cancelled a renewal next year. The only reason I’m not freaking out about the $60 is that I thought This Close, even at six episodes (and six “discussions” post-watch) was worth the money, especially if season two comes out within my subscription year.

So overall, the captions were terrible. But here’s the thing: for This Close, they were flawless. Not only that, they dealt with a bilingual show creatively and effectively. This show saved them from getting no stars.

Sub-survey: This Close as an example of captioning as it should be.

Here the captions are placed according to the speaker:

Michael and Kate in bookstore, talking, with ASL interpreter to the right, bookstore manager to the left. Captions: Can we get out of here? Okay, I need you to deal with the emergency. — Screenshot from season 1 of This Close on Sundance Now

Bookstore manager in background, Kate and Michael blurred in foreground. Captions: You can't tell me what to do. They're talking business, right? — Screenshot from season 1 of This Close on Sundance Now

White letters and, in fact, a different font are used for the ASL translation, and white on dark grey bands is for the oral dialogue. This is particularly helpful if you’re like me and following both sets of captions, listening to the hearing speaker and trying to follow the ASL or watching the fictional ASL interpreter sign and interpret! It was actually doable with this thoughtful crafting.

And when they do have to include an offscreen line, it’s correctly IDed and formatted to the side.

Kate in front of a bookstore's shelves, a finger pointing at her. Left caption: You can't tell me what to do. Right captions: [Morgan] Yeah. — Screenshot from season 1 of This Close on Sundance Now

And sidebar, I loved this scene where Michael’s hands are restrained as he is removed from a plane, and Kate says they can’t do that to a deaf person:

Kate yelling on an airplane: He's just trying to communicate, you fucking audist! — Screenshot from season 1 of This Close on Sundance Now

So, really clear, almost always perfect renditions of the audio (except for the odd Yes for Yeah). Although, I’m not sure what’s up with the three lines, especially when they are so short. Perhaps to ensure the titles are large enough to be visible for low-vision users, since Sundance Now doesn’t allow viewers different caption-display options?

This tells me one thing. VODs basically don’t care about Deaf/HoH access unless the executive producers (and guest stars like Nyle DiMarco in this case) of the show are Deaf and get the need! So, yay them, but that’s a fairly easy win, and boo Sundance overall.

Back to the show’s “Now The Discussion” segments. These featured cool young people sitting around a lovely studio drinking beer and chatting about the previous episode. Thankfully they had a Deaf/HoH participant in one I watched, and they also interviewed Shoshannah Stern and Josh Feldman after the last one. BUT but but: they applied post-production dubbing of an interpreter to overlay on the signers’ speech, rather than using the real-time interpretation they’d have had to facilitate the convo with the hearing people. So it struck me as a bit disingenuous: a bit like sim com, trying to create a false syncopation or an aversion to causing unwanted pauses in group dialogue while the signers’ words were finished being interpreted. Ew. As if waiting for a Deaf/HoH person to be orally interpreted was a problem or awkward. This struck me as ironically ableist/audist.

Also, these chats allowed expletives to be kept in the audio track but then captioned them with two hyphens, which is not only bad practice but also reinforces that the Deaf/HoH audience is not deserving of full and correct content. When characters swore/used vulgarisms in the show, the f-bombs etc. are shown fully spelled out. I thought this was another unfortunate dichotomy that spoke volumes.

As for the show itself, who doesn’t appreciate it when #DeafTalent is used, such as RJ Mitte, who has cerebral palsy? And the occasional use of loud static and other noises to obscure dialogue reinforces the challenges faced by some deaf people, in case we hearies get complacent in our viewing.

*So This Close gets ★★★★1/2 but Sundance Now itself gets only a half star.

Hulu (star rating not applicable, but see Reel Words home page image)

I’ve wanted to watch The Handmaid’s Tale since the get-go, as it is one of my favourite books. This time I did check the 17-page Terms which do allow for cancellation at any time, for reelz… I wanted to sign up for the $7.99 Limited Commercial plan ($11.99 for no commercials: isn’t that the flipping point of VOD—no commercials?)

I had trouble signing up due to not having a US zip code but a support chat told me “Our services are actually not available outside of the US unless you're a US military member living on base. Would you happen to fall in this category?”

Okay, over to:

CRAVE TV ★★★

Sub-survey: THE HANDMAID’S TALE

I went with the $7.99 monthly after 30-day free trial because I really, really wanted to see the show and didn’t mind paying for month two if I didn’t get through it all. (Who was I kidding? I binged it!)

Sidebar: as I’m sure you know, this was filmed in Toronto and around/near the GTA, so if you’re interested, here are links to the locations details.

https://torontoist.com/2017/06/where-the-handmaids-tale-was-filmed-in-toronto-part-one/

https://torontoist.com/2017/07/where-the-handmaids-tale-was-filmed-in-toronto-part-2/

If you go to my website home page, you’ll see a screenshot from Hulu from a trailer for the show. I discovered that they hadn’t done anything to address the issues of captioning since it was bought by Crave, and here are some of the more problematic captions as they appeared in Episode 1.

The Handmaid’s Tale has some parts of captioning done right, but then there are the usual inconsistencies that creep in. Sometimes [indistinct radio chatter] is heard and captioned as a very important part of setting and mood for the show, but at other times it is not captioned when clearly heard and significant. This does not provide full and complete access. And that’s supposed to be a standard in this country, but it is not enforced.

The show starts with a bang, with sirens blaring before the first visible frame, but [SIRENS BLARING] only shows for one second (nonstandard practice) and does not continue with the action, even though this is important to set up the mood and story.

This show is often based on the unshared thoughts of the heroine, Offred, and what she does dare to utter aloud. But these are not differentiated. (That’s Captioning 101, by the way.) In this scene, she was mocking another character internally but vocally answered Yes to her.

Offred leaving sumputuous grounds of house; captions: You wanna come along? Yes. — The Handmaid's Tale exterior

Below, a character who is losing it says I want my mom. and is comforted by Offred with a gentle Okay. We can barely see this dark scene, so a caption-dependent person might well be confused by the lack of speaker ID.

Dim shot of woman's head. Captions: I want my mom. Okay. — Screenshot from season 1 of The Handmaid's Tale on Crave TV

Netflix’s style guide determines that vulgarisms are to be spelled out (see my discussion of this around the 45-second mark on my Craption Eyerolls series on YouTube), and the same problem arises here. I’m not sure if the captioner wasn’t savvy or was applying their own personal values to not using the spelling cum. Either way, QC should have caught this. Crave certainly lets the f-bombs drop in captions, so I don’t think it was an issue of conservatism.

Offred lying on a pillow in moonlight in a dark room; caption: I can feel the Commander's come [sic] running out of me. — Screenshot from season 1 of The Handmaid's Tale on Crave TV

The Handmaid’s Tale takes place in a new-order society which has retro values. Church bells toll frequently, driven by plot and mood. But I kind of think using thrice is a bit over the top. Since it’s not the first time that church bells toll in the episode, space could have been saved by shortening the subject thus: Bells tolling three times. We would get that they are church bells from episode history, context and connotation.

Looking down from window to SUV in a driveway by a garden. Caption: (CHURCH BELLS TOLL THRICE) — Screenshot from season 1 of The Handmaid's Tale on Crave TV

Sometimes, captions are moved up to avoid covering a speaker’s mouth to make it clear that the person on screen is the speaker. But here Offred is not speaking; Aunt Lydia’s words should be italicized both as offscreen and over an amplification system. It also just looks weird.

Offred looking down, distressed. Caption: As you know, the penalty for rape is death. — Screenshot from season 1 of The Handmaid's Tale on Crave TV

Just as we need to see the speaker’s mouth moving, we need to watch Offred’s eyes carefully, as they reflect so much of what she may not say aloud. The cinematography in the series includes a lot of close-ups, particularly of Offred, to make us feel sympatico with her. Here, she is appalled by the speech, but we’re distracted by the titles actually touching her eyes proper rather than pondering her reaction. I talk about the need to facilitate audience immersion, rather than distract, frequently on my website. Breaking or preventing that immersion is one of the main ways to fail the caption or subtitle user, and it’s a key focus in my posts. This scene was made less evocative by careless captioning. And again, this show has been bought and the captions could have been improved by the new provider, but they either didn’t check or didn’t care.

Close-up. Offred looking up, pensively. Caption: But we cannot wish that ugliness away. Caption coversher eyebrows and upper parts of her eyes. — Screenshot from season 1 of The Handmaid's Tale on Crave TV

I really dislike the way VODs treat music, songs and lyrics. The presentations are not helpful, the rules don’t make sense, and they’re inconsistent. And they need to change.

Credit for director Reed Morano. Caption (YOU DON'T OWN ME BY LESLEY GORING PLAYING) — Screenshot from season 1 of The Handmaid's Tale on Crave TV

Here, for clarity, I would have styled the caption like this:

[♫ You Don’t Own Me ♫ by Lesley Gore]

It’s obvious that it’s playing—by the fact that the caption is there—and it’s obviously a title of a song, as indicated by the addition of customary musical notes. Had the house style not been to use ALL CAPS for sound effects, styling this like I have would have made the text clearer as a title, too.

And now, the pièce de résistance, the type of reason this show is on my home page:

Credit for Samira Wiley. Caption: alt code gibberish Don't say I can't go with other boys alt code gibberish. — Screenshot from season 1 of The Handmaid's Tale on Crave TV

Every musical caption has these—what I can only guess are Unicode cut-and-paste issues. This says We don’t care enough about accessibility to create acceptable captioning for our users.

And this is the crux of the matter. Communication is a right, and bad communication is a breach of that right.

Kate pointing angrily offscreen; caption: You can't hold a deaf person's hands like that. — Screenshot from season 1 of This Close on Sundance Now

As people in the cultural-content and entertainment industry, people who use captions and subtitles (basically everyone at some point or another) are our everything. The reason we have jobs. The reason we will always have work. And if there is one theme that is prevalent on my website, it is that the audience deserves better, and we should be ashamed of delivering less than excellent. Sure, human errors happen. We do our best. But when we deliver a product at subpar quality because it doesn’t matter to us personally or we are ignorant of issues of accessibility, we fail our fellow viewers.

I’m not the only one who thinks like this. I noted this Gamasutra post for its candour, and it reminds me to try my best to make my work accessible:

“I never have forgot the feeling of of depriving someone of an experience just because I didn't think to add a button”

Ian Holstead, Ubisoft

By providing craptions, VODs are preventing all but primarily D/deaf/hard of hearing viewers from accessing content—analogously blindfolding them.

I think we can do better than an average of 1.7★ out of ★★★★★ in caption and subtitle content on VODs. Industry standards are 95–98% accuracy, and in these five services I have found a 34% rate of success.

Please share this widely. And please leave a comment about your experiences in other countries.

Coming soon: Apps for ASL Learners; Creative Applications of Captions and Subtitles: Yay or Nay?

How Uncaptioned Movies Are Like Old-Fashioned Vegetable Peelers

January 21, 2018February 20, 2018reelwords

Old-fashioned vegetable or fruit peeler, with bare metal handle, against a mottled grey background Would it really kill us hearing folks to go to the movies with open captions?

No one complains about sidewalk curb ramps or the bumpy yellow warning strips at TTC** subway stations: they’re just…there. We don’t tell folks in wheelchairs or scooters to use regular-height curbs and in the evenings only, or folks who are blind they will have safety during rush hours only. Then why the flip are we insisting that captioned movies (the few that are provided with captions) will be shown only on certain days, schedules and cinema screens?

I propose that we caption all movies and make them available at all times.

Now, before you whip out your I-hate-subtitled-foreign-films argument or your I’m-a-details-person rhetoric about how captions will block your view of the mise-en-scène, just grab a handful of popcorn and hear me out.

Humans don’t tend to love change. But generally, we do adapt. That’s why images like this are amusing:

We think, Wow, I can’t believe I used to put up with that! It’s ugly, it’s uncomfortable, it’s inefficient, and not everyone can use that thing effectively.

Eventually, we can barely remember what life was like before a new, improved version and, usually, we even realize that the old way wasn’t that great after all.

That is what would happen with open captions on movies. (Open captions are those that don’t leave the screen—you can’t decide to “close” them and watch video/TV/movies without. They’re ever-present.) We would become so used them that we wouldn't even remember what it was like not to have them. Non-users would tune them out; users would enjoy content more easily.

Not only would about 10% more of the population be able to go to the movies, individuals could broaden their social horizons by being able to attend a film with D/deaf or hard of hearing friends. As I mentioned in a recent article, I couldn’t attend a movie with more than two deaf friends due to the undersupply of assistive equipment (never mind captions). My more cynical side doesn’t understand why movie producers and cinema mega corps aren’t embracing this—aren’t they supposed to want higher box-office takings?

When surtitles*** were introduced to the opera world (by a Canadian company, by the way), people went bonkers. Opera would be ruined, the companies wailed. Opera had to be kept pure, cried the audiences. Guess what happened. More people started going. And most of them were young people. I LOVE surtitles and find they have enriched my opera experience. And if I lose interest or there’s a repetitive text being sung, I just look away. They’re placed in opera houses in such a way so that they don’t distract the disinterested eye but are quickly adjusted to when used. I don’t have to use or pay attention to them if I don’t want to.

But wait! you may interject, you can skip reading boring repeats in opera, but you can’t skip dialogue in a movie or you’ll be lost! Aha! rejoin I. Welcome to the world of the D/deaf and hard of hearing: the dialogue is integral to film. You’re aiding my argument.

And if you’re going to tell me your eye never leaves the multiplex screen for 92 minutes and you have taken in every object in a film, you must have a photographic memory. Most of us aren’t taking in the whole scene—in fact only about 12% of it (Sorry, directors!)—and research suggests that subtitles (and presumably captions) improve the visual experience of film or TV content. Or we look down when we drop popcorn, check our phone for the time, note the green or red exit sign, look at the couple two rows down who won’t stop talking, etc. We already are distracted. If anything, the research suggests, captions will hold our attention to the visual, not adversely affect it.

Also, captions and subtitles that have been edited should be of such a standard that we stop noticing that we’re reading them. So even if our eye does drift to them, they’ll allow us to be fully immersed in the storyline.

We have scent-free institutions for those with allergies. We have Braille on bathroom doors and other public signs. We allow service animals into restaurants. We keep peanuts out of schools. We’re starting to provide alternative-experience concerts for people on the autism spectrum. Do we have a fit about these accommodations? No. They have become part of the public fabric. Those who benefit from them, use them. Those who don’t, ignore them. So why the radio silence about open captions for movies? It’s like it’s not even up for discussion.

If you are such a purist cinephile who must see a “clean” version of a director’s oeuvre, buy the DVD with the director’s cut. (God knows it’ll be out soon enough.)

Or, even better, why don’t you invent some disposable eye gear like 3D glasses that will block out caption boxes at the bottom of screens? Or maybe a big tool, that looks like ET, to stick in your cupholder that will project the virgin film to your sightline alone? Oh…you…wait—why should you be put out so much when you’re just trying to see a movie?

That’s an interesting question, now, isn’t it?

* flickr.com, Grannies Kitchen, "Vintage Vegetable Peeler"

**TTC is the Toronto Transit Commission, which encompasses subways, buses, and LRT and hooks into regional traffic options.

***Surtitles is a trademarked version of supertitles, but as few people seem to know the latter term, I am referring to the former for clarity.

“I wish I had heard all of my dad’s eulogy”: Hearing Aids as a New Lease on Life

January 12, 2018January 15, 2018reelwords

Patricia MacDonald is one of a few editorial colleagues with a story to share about hearing. Hers is honest and hopeful. I'm taking her words to heart as I go to get my hearing retested later this month.

She also touches on how she uses closed captioning, reminding us that not all users are totally deaf or "hearies" using captions for other reasons.

Headshot of Patricia Morris MacDonald.

I can’t remember when I started noticing my hearing loss. I was probably in my late 20s. I do know the exact moment I couldn’t deny any longer that it was a problem: when I couldn’t hear everything my brother was saying as he was delivering my father’s eulogy. What a thing to miss.

But still I didn’t get my hearing checked. I knew I needed hearing aids, but I didn’t want to wear them. Hearing aids are for old people, I thought. Everyone will notice them. So I struggled on for another few years, constantly frustrated when I caught only bits of conversations, wondering what I had missed when others around me were laughing at something I hadn’t heard. My husband bought me a cheap little device that amplified sound, and I used that a lot, especially when I was watching TV. It worked great but could only do so much. I was still missing out on a lot in real life.

I did eventually get my hearing tested, and the results were as expected: significant hearing loss in both ears. The culprit? Otosclerosis. Basically there was a hardening of the bones in my middle ear, and they were unable to vibrate properly in order to conduct sound. The good news? I was a perfect candidate for hearing aids. The bad news? I was a perfect candidate for hearing aids. I still didn’t want them, and it was at least another year before I finally went for a fitting.

The catalyst was an editing conference I attended in Ottawa in 2012. The sessions were fine because I had my trusty sound booster with me; socializing, however, was a different story. One-on-one interaction was okay for the most part, but put me around a table in a noisy restaurant and I was lost. I still ended up having a wonderful time, but it was a wake-up call. I needed to do something.

So I took the leap and got two hearing aids. And suddenly I could hear all that I was missing—and it was a lot, trust me. I was very grateful for this new lease on life, although I was extremely self-conscious for the first little while, the first couple of years, even. To this day I’m still a little self-conscious. But I can hear better, and that’s really all that matters.

Hearing aids aren’t the perfect solution, though. I often have trouble hearing on the phone and when I’m in a crowded room. I still miss some things.

Closed captioning has become a good friend, especially when I’m watching a show with fast dialogue or accents.

So there’s still frustration. But I can function almost normally again. And I must say that when I “take my ears out” at night, I welcome the quiet and enjoy a good sleep. It’s not all bad. :^)

It’s taken a while, but I’ve come to terms with my hearing loss—I have a disability that fortunately I was able to correct. I just wish I had done it years earlier. I wish I had heard all of my dad’s eulogy. But I was thinking about how I would look instead of how I could hear. If you have hearing loss and are hesitant about trying hearing aids, for whatever reason, I urge you to give them a shot. It will change your life for the better.

Patricia MacDonald is a freelance copyeditor in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, specializing in sports books and memoirs, guides for athletes and coaches, and textbooks for physical education and kinesiology students.

She can be reached at powerplayediting@gmail.com.

Photo courtesy of P. MacDonald.

The State of the Caption: Deaf Accessibility in Toronto’s Cinemas

January 8, 2018January 8, 2018reelwords

In December 2017, I contacted the main corporate and some independent film venues in Toronto to canvass their provision of access to hearing assistance for the *Deaf, deaf and hard of hearing. Cinemas are only able to provide captions when production companies include the files. But who has what capabilities?

Before you scroll away because you “don’t know any deaf people,” consider this: you may think you don’t, but a lot of people don’t advertise their deafness because a) it doesn’t define them and b) it’s frustrating to keep explaining it repeatedly to hearing people. Also, hearing folks do use captions: English language learners; people needing cognitive support with visual reinforcement; watching shows with heavily accented or audio-obscured speakers; and in noisy places or where the volume is off or problematic. To read about my personal experience using assistive tech in a cinema, read this article. But here’s my experience accessing information about captioning and hearing-assistive devices in eight Toronto cinemas and chains.

In my online contact attempts, my website-linked business name was in my email signature (providing transparency), and I asked only the following of each recipient:

Hello,

I've looked at your accessibility page, and I'm writing to get up-to-date information about the availability of listening assistance at your cinema[s], be it open captions or assistive technologies. I'm in Toronto. Can the Deaf, deafened or hard of hearing attend movies with full access? Do I just show up and any showing will just have assistance available?

Thank you.

Here are the fascinating results of my inquiries.

Exterior photo of the Cineplex Scotiabank multiplex in Toronto

Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/stevenharris/3371960989

Cineplex

Not surprisingly for a large corporation, I was assigned a ticket to my inquiry and received an automated reply. It said:

- Please type your reply above this line -##

Screenshot of automated reply from Cineplex about caption options and how to access that information on their website

I replied,

If an individual reads my email, they'll see I've reviewed the website and am requesting up to date information—i.e., has anything about availability changed?, etc.

I'd appreciate a non-automated reply.

Many thanks.

Hello Vanessa,

Thank you for contacting Cineplex.

All of our theatre locations have the capability to present shows with Closed Captioning and/or Described Services. Ultimately we rely on the film distributors to provide our theatres with the appropriate files for each film so our guests can enjoy these services; because of this there can sometimes be a film without these features offered. You can always check the availability of these services by searching film showtimes online and if you see (CC/DS) underneath the film format your show will have Closed Captioning and/or Described Services. (see example below)

If you need more information on what each device does see the links below.

https://www.ci neplex.com/Theatres/ClosedCaption

https://www.cineplex.com/theatres/described-services

When you go to your local theatre simply request either device from the box office and the staff will be happy to set it up for your show.

If you have anymore questions please let me know.

Have a great day!

Cineplex Guest Services

I thought the “there can sometimes be a film without these features offered” was gilding the lily a bit. I also felt the DS info indicated that they were copy-and-pasting and not writing back specifically with my question in mind. I wrote back,

Thank you again.

But would it be possible to implement a search function so that we can look for films with CCs rather than clicking through every possible movie and theatre to see if they have captions/assistance? I think I will also have to approach cinemaclocktoronto.com about considering adding a search feature, since most of us look for movies online in one place, not at the discrete sites of cinema corporations.

The answer:

Hello again

I will happily share your feedback with the IT team in the hopes they can add that functionality. Please note you can search individual theatres and their showtimes at the bottom of each of those links I sent you.

https://www.cineplex.com/Theatres/ClosedCaption

https://www.cineplex.com/theatres/described-services

Have a great day!

Cineplex Guest Services

Hm. I think a chat with Powers That Be about searches and increased access would be fruitful...if only I could reach them.

External photo of the Carlton Cinema in Toronto

Imagine Cinemas

Image: grainger via https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Carlton_Cinemas_Toronto.jpg

The much-loved local Carlton and its related cinemas have demonstrated commitment to accessibility for audiences and employees, which I have respected greatly. Plus, their staff are outstanding in their customer service, and their reply reflected some of that.

Hi Vanessa,

We have a few locations with assistive listening devices, however we often experience technical difficulties with them which is why they aren’t advertised. We also have a few locations that play open caption films on certain days/ show times.

I will forward your email on to our Carlton and Market Square locations as they are our DT [downtown] Toronto locations and would have a better idea as to what they actually have.

And further follow up, since I’d mentioned me needing to bring this up with cinemaclocktoronto.com:

Our Carlton location have headphones that amplify sounds but no open caption.

Our Market Square location has assistive listening devices but have expressed that they don’t work very well. They do however have 1 open caption movie a week (see screenshot on how it would appear). They are the ones that say OC. The upcoming week they are playing The Greatest Showman and the following week is Star Wars.

Cinema clock is a third party website so unfortunately we cannot control how they display content.

Hope that helps!

Customer service first prize to Imagine! They already show one captioned movie a week—not what I’d call fully accessible but certainly open and willing to improve. They admitted their lackluster customer feedback and communicated that openly to me. They were also the first company to reply—the same day I emailed and a week before the other replies began to trickle in. Small chain, bigger heart?

Interior photo of the Hal Jackman auditorium at the AGO in Toronto

Image: https://www.ago.net/jackman-hall-overview

Jackman Hall, AGO

I received this reply:

Hello Vanessa,

Thank you for your email.

At the moment Jackman Hall Theatre is not equipped with open captions options or assistive technologies. We are able to transmit, however do not have the devices in house. It would be up to the client to provide the film with captions built into the film as well as provide any devices or hardware. We are working towards upgrading our venue in order to be more inclusive. At this time we not able to assist with deaf, deafened or hard of hearing patrons with full access unless the film is subtitle or a client provides the assistive devices/hardware.

Please feel free to contact me if you have further questions or concerns.

I found this interesting considering that it is in the AGO, which is 33% government funded, and that the AGO Transformation, which included the renovation of Jackman Hall, was completed in 2008. The $276 million project couldn’t throw in some hardware then or since??

Exterior photo of the TIFF Bell Lightbox cinema in Toronto

Image: https://www.ticketmaster.ca/TIFF-Bell-Lightbox-tickets/artist/2270943

TIFF Bell Lightbox

Bell TIFF Lightbox’s reply was interesting in several ways.

Hello Vanessa,

Thank you for your email and interest in attending films at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.

Hearing Assist (which raises the volume for visitors with slight to moderate hearing impairment) is available for all of our screenings as it is provided by our theatre.

The availability of Closed Captioning and Descriptive Audio is dependant [sic] on the copy provided to us by the distributor. If we have films that come with Closed Captioning or Descriptive Audio we will display that information on our Website.

Please refer to the example below. (SUB = Subtitle, CC = Closed Captioning, DS = Descriptive Sound, TBLB 3 = Cinema #3)

When you arrive at the cinema please inform Box Office staff that you require additional equipment and the staff will be happy to assist you with the set-up and procedure.

Hope this information helps.

They said Hearing Assist was used as an amplifier but a phone call confirmed the brand was Listen, so this doesn’t seem to be updated info as requested.

Note, too, the use of the term “hearing impairment,” which is interesting terminology from a charity purporting to be “committed to a strategy that works to remove barriers to interacting with our programming” (TIFF, 2016: http://humber.ca/makingaccessiblemedia/modules/03/09.html). The echo I experienced was still a barrier. And being non-hearing is not considered an “impairment” or disability by the so-called afflicted or disabled. (http://cad.ca/issues-positions/statistics-on-deaf-canadians/)

I’ll also add here that during December, as a TIFF member, I received nine donation-dunning emails between the 13th and 31st, with clickbait-worthy subject lines like “You’re on my mind” pleading for access to our thoughts about connection and access to members’ wishes. I am seriously considering cancelling my membership. It will be dependent on the response I get when I email them. If they’re really serious about “want[ing] to know what you think,” they may bite.

I wrote back asking about a search function for CCed films.

Hi Vanessa,

We are glad to hear the information was helpful.

At this time we do not offer a feature on our website like the one you have described but I have passed your email on to the department that handles the website for consideration when planning future updates and features. In the mean time [sic] clicking through the various films is the only way to see the information regarding Closed Captioning and Descriptive Audio.

Regards,

Customer Relations

Both in email and in person, I was readily informed that Call Me by My Name has CCs. This is incorrect, and I suspect a lot of venues and services, perhaps unwittingly, plug such films as accessible to the non-hearing: that film’s dialogue includes three languages, which are subtitled for marketability; it is not accessible in that it was intentionally released with non-hearing audiences in mind—that is captioning.

Interior photo of the auditorium of the Hot Docs Cinema in Toronto

Image: https://hotdocscinema.ca/c/history

Hot Docs

The old Bloor Cinema seems to be typically at the mercy of producers’ inclusion (or not) of caption files. I suspect most documentarians are making their films on low budgets; however, some are backed by humanitarian organizations, and you’d think their mores would support full accessibility. (Perhaps some PhD student can do some research into how many docs are captioned…) And, frankly, I’m surprised when the theatre was renovated, some funds weren’t allocated for assistive equipment like CaptiView. Surely some doc files are captioned?

Hi Vanessa,

Thanks for your question!

Firstly, for each screening we can provide head phones that allow the viewer to increase their own listening volume independently.

For more specific hearing aid devices, such as closed captioning, the most up-to-date information would be available at our Box Office, per screening; each documentary comes with/without its own set of closed captioning and hard of hearing accessibilities.

The best option would be to call our box office the week your preferred documentary is showing and ask for the accessibility options on that specific film.

I hope this helps.

Exterior photo of the Revuew Cinema in Toronto

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revue_Cinema

The Revue

Being a very small enterprise, understandably they wrote back

Hello Vanessa,

We currently do not have assisted listening devices available at our theatre, But we are working on it.
So sorry for the inconvenience... We will make it a priority to attain these devices during the new year and you will be contacted promptly once we have acquired a few.

Thank you for your interest,

-Revue Cinema

Note the apology and plan of action. Good sign! I’ve made a note to check back with them.

Interior photo of the Royal Cinema's auditorium in Toronto

Image: http://newsite.theroyal.to/about-the-royal/#

Royal

Through several emails, I learned that the Royal generally does not offer access to deaf-assistive technology but does, interestingly, have two series events that feature access vehicles: Drunk Feminist Films and Screen Queens, the former having hired ASL interpretation in the past due to a small Deaf community being involved. The other reason for provided captions is that events have live comedy commentary over top of the movie through microphones, thus captions allow people to listen to the comedians talk about the movie while also watching the movie. But with general programming, like all cinemas, they are stuck with only being able to provide captioning when it is provided by movie producers.

Cinema Clock https://www.cinemaclock.com/ont/toronto

I also emailed this clearinghouse of movie listings to see if the search function could not be tweaked to include a way to find only those movies with CCs.

The email envelope icon on their home page does not work, so I went to their Contact Us link on the More tab and filled out an online form there. After three weeks, I have not heard back from them.

I’m going to assume that we have it relatively good in Toronto and that access to assistance for deaf moviegoers is generally sketchy or non-existent in most smaller Canadian cities and towns. If you know otherwise, please share information in the Comments.

If you're interested in accessing more caption options (i.e. for any time slot, not just the cinema's dead day), have a polite chat with or send an informative email to the management. Eventually, feedback will work its way up the corporate ladder and maybe—one day—access to movies for the Deaf, deaf and hard of hearing will no longer be considered an extra cost or frill. It'll just be going to the movies.

Accessibility in Movies and Video in 2018

January 8, 2018January 8, 2018reelwords

...and Why I’m Not Going to Shut Up about It

I recently had my first experiences using hearing assistance technology (and I use the word technology with something of an eyeroll) at two movie theatres in Toronto. Here's why filmmakers have got to start putting accessibility functions and services into their budgets. The cinemas can't project captions that aren't there.

Amazon's photo of a Listen personal amplifier: a small black device resembling a handheld transistor radio, showing volume and battery levels in a screen near the top.

Audio Assistance

At the first cinema, I was lent a Listen personal amplifier device with disposable earbuds in exchange for my driver’s license as collateral.

I was rather excited because I was seeing Interstellar, and I knew from previous viewings at home and in the cinema that Matthew McConnaughey’s voice is very difficult to hear in that movie. I thought this would help me hear more of his lines.

With the Listen brand amplifier (smaller than handheld transistor radios and thicker than a cellphone), there was a belt clip. That’s great if you’re wearing something with a waistband. Also, a little red light is visible, which I suspect may be annoying to seat neighbours, and I’m not sure there’s necessarily enough earbud-wire length to turn it upside down in your cupholder or to wear it upside down on your belt to not distract them periperhally.

If you know Interstellar, you’ll know that Hans Zimmer’s awesome soundtrack blasts through much of it—and I mean blasts, to the point of the seats and walls shaking in a non-IMAX movie: organ-lover’s delight! So, every time the action and mood was ramping up, I had to whip the earbuds out (I ended up using my own, as the provided ones were cheap) or have my eardrums practically split. Fine: hazard of the film, and amplification was not needed at that point. However, what was so disappointing was that all the hearing receiver did was create an annoying echo due to a delay in transmission, sort of like echos in cell calls or the overseas long-distance calls of yesteryear on landlines. Now I was hearing Matthew utter his tortured feelings in duplicated mumbling. I gave up on the “assistance” halfway through. This is a device retailing for about $250US or $400CA, so it’s no cheapie, and still the results were less than stellar…

How can an echo assist hearing? Do more current or more expensive models avoid this problem? Leave a comment below if you have other experiences. I retrieved my ID without comment, as I didn’t feel the box-office staff would be very invested in my feedback. They’re 20something with normal hearing, after all.

A CaptiView device in the foreground of a dim cinema auditorium; the green digital print gives connection instructions for that cinema.

Visual Assistance

My second experience was using CaptiView in a cinema; I did call ahead to make sure one would be available. Not only was it available, it was at the tickettaker’s booth, ready to go, and she knew how to set it up: good start! It conked out during previews “battery very low!!” and the manager said it was because it had just been used in a previous showing, so that indicates to me that perhaps several more are needed on hand to provide access while spent ones are recharged. Nevertheless he had another immediately available. Interestingly, they did not ask for ID or any security for the device: not that I’d want to walk out with one, but I was still pleasantly surprised not to be treated like a potential thief.

Complicating this experience was the flawed subtitles in the movie I saw when a foreign lanugage was translated, so I had two layers of imperfect access to negotiate in my attempt to be fully immersed in the story. In general, the CaptiView worked okay. But:

As I’ve pointed out before, you have to place it in your cupholder, so that leave no cupholder for your pop, which is a problem if you also have popcorn to eat.
Twice the device popped out of the cupholder and fell to the ground: you need to really shove it down prior to the show!
The green type was a good size and clear, except when it didn’t show! Some captions were missing—as in entire or partial sentences never came up and the subsequent lines were on the second or third lines of the device, so I don’t know if that meant the problem was in the CaptiView or the digital file, but it happened about a dozen times.
I felt like I was restricted to a corner of the back row: the green light is distracting to other audience members. What if I had arrived late to a filled auditorium? Would I have to ask a bunch of people to move or would they have to put up with it?
Only the main feature was guaranteed to be captioned. In fact, as noted above, one trailer was captioned on the device. All the other movies that could have attracted the Deaf/hoh audience did not. (I’m assuming the Red Sparrows film itself is accessible and not just the trailer.) And all the pre-film promotional chatter, games, quizzes, interviews, etc. were not accessible. What—only hearing people want to know celebrity news and movie hype?
What if a bunch of my D/deaf friends and I wanted to go to a movie? We couldn’t go spontaneously (what cinema is going to be able to guarantee six recharged devices always available?) or perhaps at all even if notice was given to a smaller company that might not have that many CaptiViews. So, in essence, we’re still facing a lack of or inadequate access. We’re still not able to participate fully in cultural content in the same way hearing folks are. Would it be okay if wheelchair ramps were only available 10% of the time?

In general, the experience wasn’t a disaster, but I certainly wasn’t enthralled with this option. Between my eyes constantly changing focus from short- to long-range, stumbling and losing story immersion when captions were missing, and missing a lot of the movie’s visual impact with the device as a distraction, I definitely did not engage with the film the way I normally would. In short, the CaptiView is sometimes available, but not always conducive to full cultural engagement, and that is a half-baked experience, not full access.

In December 2017, Charlie Swinbourne (UK journalist and Limping Chicken blogger about all things Deaf) started a poll to have UK cinemas dedicate one screen per multiplex to captioned movies. This was prompted after a fiasco of inaccessibility at the opening of The Last Jedi, where Deaf/deaf folks were treated shamefully. As of early January, he had 23,000 signatures and had spoken to cinema executives about relevant issues.

This coincided with the investigation I was carrying out over the pond, which I have tweeted about, and I have been engaging in similar conversations with execs of the cinema corps I have access to in Toronto: Cineplex, Lantern/Imagine, TIFF, Hal Jackman (formerly Cinématheque at the AGO), the Revue, the Royal, and Hot Docs (formerly the Bloor Cinema). I emailed each via general contact emails to start and asked what availability they had for Deaf/deaf/hard of hearing moviegoers. The responses—some seemingly canned, some more invested—are here.

I’ve had conversations with some of these same execs to see if I can’t do some educating about hearing loss, advocating for better accessibility, and asking for meaningful follow through. Some have indicated a willingness to implement more if more products were provided with caption files. The general public tends to blame the cinemas, but they can’t project captions that aren’t on the film file. It’s the movie producers who need to step up.

I also canvassed some small film producers who are making films on (their own) shoestring budgets. Again, there is willingness to caption but not available financial resources.

This investigation has convinced me that if there is to be greater access, it must begin with the major film producers—the ones with the financial ability and the cultural clout to make it the norm to include caption-accessible prints amongst their distributions. I bet if a close relative of one of the big wigs were deaf, they’d have captions all over their product, including trailers (of which I only saw one file on CaptiView for the upcoming Red Sparrows by 20th Century Fox and Chernin Entertainment).

Finally, I don’t know why the government has paid only lip service to the large Deaf, deafened and hard of hearing communities, considering how many there are in Canada (most Western countries use the estimate of 10% of the population as having some form of hearing loss or problems). Accessibility to content for the Deaf, deaf or hard of hearing has been in the supposed forefront of accessibility changes for 30 years (really spurred on by the advent of VCRs in the 80s), but not much has changed. Currently, there's a survey about live captioning in Canadian TV, but this is duplication. The CRTC did a survey about captioning 10 years ago, and the requirement to provide captions (with various exceptions) is not enforced. You can read about its status here; while you can complain about bad captions, the independent ombudsman they promised in 2015 is still slated for the future. They've done standards policies, surveys, focus groups and pilot projects (2008, 2012, 2015). Where's the improvement? They don't seem to understand the nuances of captioning, reading, and how textual editing affects user experience. You can have the fastest captioners in the world produce CCs, but "quality control" needs to be two-stepped: technical and editorial. The latter is not taught or enforced. I know because I worked as a captioner. (I did offer to help set up a vocational school so that effective language training would be offered—in Canada, anyway. But crickets.)

VODS like Netflix* have continued to do the poorest job, just enough to stay out of regulatory trouble it seems, but my educational portfolio of hundreds of caption fails proves that the non-hearing are completely underserviced in all public services with captioning. Based on the attempts I’ve made to educate and offer improvement, the interest and will just isn’t there. And I’m not going to shut up about it until people needing excellent captioning in all aspects of life start seeing improvement to access, and therefore participation in Canadian life.

I’ve also written about 2017 being touted as the year of the deaf in the movies. Here’s what I thought about The Shape of Water, Wonderstruck and all the hype about D/deaf folks in film.

*I really don’t have a hate-on for Netflix alone; it’s just the system I have and use, not having a TV. But I do have ill regard for them: their attempts to service the non-hearing are terrible and nowhere near meet their advertised standards. This is because their system of hiring “Preferred Vendors” promotes unqualified bottom-feeders in many cases. (Not all—I have subtitling colleagues who are professional translators and titlers who are NPVs, but they are the exception to the rule.) If you’d like to send me screenshots of caption or subtitle fails from other sources, please do (info@reelwords.ca): I’ll add them to my portfolio of fails and fixes.

For information on booking teaching and speaking engagements, see that tab on my website.

Top image: from amazon.com

Bottom image: by author

Deafness and the Movies in 2017: Sanctimonious Narratives?

January 8, 2018January 22, 2018reelwords

Sally Hawkins signing "egg" to offscreen monster in the dim laboratory in The Shape of Water

A couple of movies with ASL and people go crazy, saying the tide has turned for Deaf/deaf actors and filmmakers. Um—not necessarily. Here’s a new-year look back at the hype and some re-examined perspective.

I loved Wonderstruck on a bunch of levels. Millicent Simmonds certainly appears to have an acting career ahead of her, but there was a lot of blowback about Julianne Moore having been cast to play a Deaf woman. The movement for equality in Hollywood often makes the point that mainstream actors should not be cast to play folks with various differences in terms of realism, employment for overlooked talent, and plain ol’ decency. Not being Deaf or deaf, I don’t feel qualified to comment on Moore’s casting or portrayal: I was too busy trying to watch the ASL by her and Tom Noonan, being a new student of signing myself.

I feel like the movie would have made more of a statement had it been distributed with open (always on) captions. It took some risks with a lot of other artistic choices but didn’t inherently provide access to all viewers and include the D/deaf/HoH except by half-assed access in some theatres with some assistance (in other words, the status quo). A petition about this went virtually nowhere.

I binged on the Call the Midwife series, which did use a deaf actress in Season 4, Episode 8. I can’t comment much as she learned BSL for her role and I am only familiar with ASL. But I can’t believe no one has batted an eye at IMDb’s plot outline being about “a deaf-and-dumb woman”! Have we just backslid several decades? Holy moly—send their PR department a cheat sheet on current acceptable vocabulary choices!

I went to The Shape of Water knowing I wasn’t really into director Guillermo del Toro, but my friend was curious and I wanted to see the ASL by Sally Hawkins. Again, not being D/deaf, I can’t really judge her skill. However, I was uncomfortable with the implied sim com. Simultaneous communication—signing and speaking English at the same time—is generally considered oppressive and disrespectful of the Deaf community and signing as a bona fide lanugage. In the movie, there are moments when Hawkins is signing and Richard Jenkins’s character is translating into English for himself, but the signs were syllabically aligned with sign movements, so the number of signs matched the number of words. This was factually incorrect interpretation, and it bugged me that a production decision was (seemingly) made to “make it equal” for the hearing audience to supposedly access the ASL. We made the signing inclusive by ironically captioning it for the hearing to access, but didn’t make the entire movie open-captioned for the deaf to access (again). That kind of inequality and ingrained exclusion makes me really annoyed. I don’t expect every screening of every film to be OCed, but one about a signer could surely have made a statement of inclusion like this, couldn’t it? Particularly since the main theme was otherness...

Some time ago, I wrote about The Tribe or Plemya (dir. Miroslav Slaboshpitsky, 2014), an uncaptioned and unsubtitled Ukrainian sign-language film with no spoken dialogue, which was made all the more affecting by not making it accessible to the hearing with captions: it’s one of the most powerful films I’ve seen. If we want to get all warm and fuzzy about deafness entering mainstream pop culture, we need to back the production and embrace the release of art like this: made with and for (and preferably by) those being portrayed.

Four boys lead a smaller one by the ear down a dimly lit institutional hallway; a still from the movie The Tribe.

ABC’s Switched at Birth (exposed more broadly by Netflix) apparently drove tons of people to go sign up for ASL across North America. Once the complexity and demands of this beautiful and challenging language were encountered in the classroom, though, I wonder how many stuck it out? Marlee Matlin made sign language sexy to cinema, and her advocacy over the decades has improved attitudes towards the Deaf. ASL advocate and model Nyle DiMarco certainly turns heads "despite" being Deaf, and The ASL App has upped the cool factor. But let’s not get carried away and create a sanctimonious narrative that the movies are all over deafness and sign language. If there were sustained interest and true access, I wouldn’t be writing op eds about the need for excellence in captioning and the right to cultural access for the Deaf, deaf and hard of hearing. In fact, there wouldn’t be any commentary about #DeafTalent: it would just be there, amidst the rest of the hearing world’s projects.

Top image: http://www.moviemuser.co.uk/2017/07/19/shape-water-trailer-sally-hawkins-meets-underwater-creature-guillermo-del-toros-latest/

Second image: www.vice.com

Captions Need Show “Bibles”

January 2, 2018March 18, 2019reelwords

Colour photo closeup of gilded Bible pages, with gold cover, snap closure and tasselled bookbark hanging in the foreground.

Captions and subtitles need "bibles" just like theatre pieces or movie productions. Like their literal iterations, these collections of information are guides for all the relevant players on how to present content so that it's clear, correct, and, most of all, consistent.

When I was a captioner, some shows had 'em and some didn't. Worst was when we had to consult fan wikis for character name spellings, backstory, etc. VODS, shows, and movies need bibles templated and used, if they're going to commit to full accessibility for all users.*

Depending on where the captioner or subtitler is, there are differences in how they would normally write as a layman and how they would do their work. A Canadian captioning a show from and about the States would defer to American dictionary spellings and definitions and standard writing style guides, plus the client's house style guide. But an American subtitling an import series from Scandinavia would be wise to not only adhere to the client's wishes and that country's standard guides but also recommend other applications based on show content and branding, audience composition and an eye to future distribution potential.

Show bibles vary from artform to artform. It may well develop to have set and costume notes and samples, helpful visual ephemera, guidelines on authorized style guides, character details, notes on directorial changes and edits (updated), and all of this should be backed up—at least twice. Hard copies might also be wise should the internetalypse happen midproduction.

Here's an example of what Netflix's much (self-)touted subtitling policies did not address or succeed at (or this wouldn't have happened).

Peaky Blinders, Season 4, Episode 5 (accessed December 2017). In one scene, Cockney Jewish character Alfie Solomons is saying Good boy but the caption says Goodbye. Perhaps the non-native captioner (or one without British background or dialectic familiarity) should not be the titler for dialogue if they can't understand the accent, let alone understand that Goodbye wouldn't even make sense in the context if that were the audio. It causes errors and (although apparently not here) extra costs in QC corrections.

Image: cropped screenshot accessed Netflix, Peaky Blinders, December 31, 2017.

If a show bible is not extant or available, a good editor will do some research and preferably some subsequent consultation. The latter should be done by the most qualified expert in their professional network: moms with English degrees don't count. Having established some form of NDA, the editor should present their problem and its context, their research, and a suggested edit to the consultant. Confirmation or correction should lead to a fix, and either way the edit should be flagged with a justified query or note to the managing editor. Time is tight on titling projects, but there's no excuse for guessing. I have a time limit on how long I'll do my own research before turning to an expert; if I can't get the ME a recommended edit, I'll pass on my recommendations for next steps.

This example also points out the pitfalls of having blinders on about vendors. Perhaps your regular multilingual translator in Europe is multitalented, but this show would have required a titler who had ties to or experience with people in London and Birmingham, for instance.

Another problem with this scene was when, in the same episode,

Alfie Solomons was captioned as speaking Italian when in fact he was speaking Yiddish...

Alfie Solomons in Peaky Blinders show is captioned as "[speaking Italian]"

...but the captioner didn't have enough linguistic background to tell the difference between guttural and romance language phonemes. (Note that although different, captions and subtitles are sometimes needed in the same product. Read more here.) The titler should have consulted someone (or perhaps shouldn't have been contracted in the first place). I have a whole discrete presentation I can give about foreign language subtitling inconsistencies within Netflix captions; see the Engagements tab to book similar lessons and discussions.

So a bible, shared with the captioner, would have been available to tell them that Alfie Solomons is a Jew from the East End, living in Birmingham, with the common interruptor of the area's "yeah" and that he has no known connections to the Italian language. These are two instances where Netflix would have been saved embarrassment from YGWYPF vendors. If they aren't embarrassed, simply in terms of access to content for the deaf they should be.

Bibles can be simple, and they don't have to be pretty. But they do need to be complete, proactive, shared and USED.

*Read here about who should be using captions and/or subtitles (and sometimes both); it's not just a "deaf problem."

Changing Text: Part II — Expletives

December 22, 2017February 20, 2018reelwords

Ada Shelby from Peaky Blinders is shouting to the projectionist behind her in a dimmed, empty cinema, Oi! I'm a Shleby too, you know. Put my fucking film back on!"

Expletives may have different treatments based on house styles, but they must still be retained in some form or another (even if it’s %^@##!).

Swear words in films or shows often bring up the issue of censorship—by whoever has the final word on content and house style. But the captioner/subtitler has a duty to at least present an argument (even if they don’t win people over) as to why potentially objectionable words must remain or at least be titled in a similar form.

No matter what country you’re working in, standards of captioning/subtitling will all get at the point that it is the titler’s job to provide full access to the video product, with 95–100% accuracy for preprogrammed content. As in book editing, the titler must not edit the work to the point of changing content. So, if I’m a very conservative person, I may not decide to “fix” f-bombs or other offensive dialogue; even if I’m liberal personally, I must not “err on the side of caution” and tone down swear words in case a vulnerable audience is watching. I may be allowed, or indeed instructed, to use house style to represent those f-bombs with nonsense characters, universally understood to mean expletives, but I may not choose to as a matter of my practice.

I complain often about CCs on Netflix (see this article for a good chuckle and my opinion here), but I do appreciate that their style guideline says “Dialogue must never be censored.” They do retain expletives as used by onscreen characters. This is as it should be.

Just as we do not cover classical sculpture with fig leaves or add clothes to nudes in paintings, we should not censor swearing in films. Screenplay writers and directors include it intentionally to produce an effect, and it is effectively intellectual theft for the titler to remove it. There are many aspects of a video product that could offend audiences, but it is their job to choose their entertainment judiciously and not ours to introduce our personal bias into the work. Titlers do not have the right to judge; the have the responsibility to provide access. Period.

[Note that the incorrect caption in the image above should read: Oi! A native English speaker, especially one with British background (who would be the ideal choice as titler) would know this. Oy is an alternative. Spelling and punctuation fails…]

If you ever see an example of captions or subtitles that do not represent the content (with the exception of occasional fudges required by timing and space allowance for reading speed), please email a screenshot to or tell me about it at info@reelwords.ca. I keep a file of such infringements to accessibility rights.

Changing Text: Part I — Opera Surtitles

December 22, 2017December 22, 2017reelwords

Long shot colour photo of an opera production with a seafaring theme as a set and English surtitles projected above the stage Image not credited on original source: https://www.sdopera.org/experience/supertitles

I’ve commented elsewhere about the responsibilities of the captioner or subtitler, which include the best practice of not changing the film’s text.* Our personal feelings about content, as far as producing or editing the content is concerned, are irrelevant. (If something is truly offensive, you can turn down the project, just as we do in book editing.) I recently participated in a survey of subtitlers about emotional reactions to content we are working on; it is a legitimate consideration. However, assuming we are content to work on the file, the captioner or subtitler (or book editor) may not change the content. We are not the creators of the work.

I saw the HD Live Met presentation in the cinema of the fabulous opera Exterminating Angel by Thomas Adès. Although it is in English, surtitles** are provided, which is common for most major opera companies. With the exception of one title which might have caused confusion with an appositive due to the accompanying live shot, they were excellent. Until the climax of this dystopian nightmare story. There, in terror, and also in the last lines of the opera, the characters are singing a prayer: Libera me de morte aeterna et lux aeterna luceat, which translates to “Deliver me from eternal death and let eternal light shine.” The use of the Latin is intentional and very moving because these words are excerpts from the Catholic Office of the Dead text. (If you know the movie or the opera, you’ll understand why these are used.) To my amazement, the Latin was not only not projected in the surtitles, it was replaced with the English as the Latin was being sung. This is unacceptable captioning (or surtitling).

While it is possible that the surtitle writer felt they were being “helpful” by providing the English, they shouldn’t have.

First, they changed Adès’s and librettist Tom Cairns’s work fundamentally. They did not write that part in English for a reason. So, right off the bat, they made an editorial decision about an artist’s work. (If Adès or Cairns directed them to do so, I would happily stand corrected, but I doubt this very much. If the Metropolitan Opera directed it, I would disagree with that decision.) Captioners do not have the right to change art text: their responsibility is to make the piece as it stands accessible. A caption editor would know to retain the original text.

Another reason this is not best practice is that it makes an editorial assumption about the audience: that they are not culturally savvy enough to know what these words mean, even if they aren’t Catholic. It would be deemed fairly common knowledge in the humanities audience to at least have a sense what that Latin excerpt was about, even if they couldn’t translate it word for word. So the surtitler decided who they were dealing with. (Again, if the Met directed them to do it—well, my words would then be directed at them.) The composer knows who he will reach with the Latin, and he knows how best to do it in that scene: with the atmospheric layer of using Latin. He does not dumb down his librettist’s text for the audience.

Opera is attracting more young people these days, so some might argue that Millennials just don’t have that common knowledge, but that too is insulting and presumptive. The surtitler may not assume: that’s not their job.

The other thing that is wrong about this involves the Deaf/deaf/hard of hearing community. Did you know that some deaf people do go to and love the opera? My deafened friend loves opera: she said as long as the voices are big enough and surtitles are provided, she can attend and enjoy live opera and HD broadcasts. So the surtitler assumed it wouldn’t matter if the English were used (even if they did know deaf folks can go to the opera), and that is the type of trope the Deaf/deaf/hard of hearing community too often faces: they don’t matter. This is akin to the attitude of I’ll tell you later or Why can’t you just enjoy the beat? which I have tweeted about. If they are in the audience, they have the right to access the artistic work as it was created by the artist. It is not the surtitler’s right to even assume they won’t be in attendance, never mind that best practices wouldn’t apply to them. They cannot change an aspect of art because they figure an attendee won’t know anyway.

A final note about surtitles: there are various technological choices available, such as the old PowerPoint way still used by some, and current surtitling software. These products can force certain style decisions for the surtitler. Also, some theatre and opera companies take divergent theoretical views of how far translations or same-language titles are to go. I belong to the more prescriptive school, obviously, and disapprove of summarization. However, there are times in opera when very repetitious text, such as in arias, may be omitted and understood as such, or when multi-part sections must be flexibly handled. Straightforward English libretti do not fall into these specialized areas of captioning skills.

Newsflash: The Deaf Are Not Intellectually Disabled

December 14, 2017March 19, 2018reelwords

Especially for a government-published "educational" graphic about accessibility!

While I appreciate the need for clear, plain language in public communication generally, it seems like the Deaf/deaf/HoH poster repeatedly discourages long, complex or complicated text, as well as menu and layout complexity, which the physical/motor disabilities version, for instance, does not. The targeted audience has hearing issues, not cognitive problems. Also, they have not bothered to research that non-hearing people use captions, which are not subtitles. Perhaps a rethink is in order? And an apology?

This kind of ignorance needs to be addressed with education and advocacy, including about the use and need for captioning. Will you help by sharing this?

The Responsibilities of the Captioner

December 11, 2017February 20, 2018reelwords

Scene from a modern-set opera with surtitles projected above the stage

I’ve commented elsewhere about the responsibilities of the captioner or subtitler, which include the best practice of not changing the film’s text.* Our personal feelings about content, as far as producing or editing the content is concerned, are irrelevant. (If something is truly offensive, you can turn down the project, just as we do in book editing.) I recently participated in a survey of subtitlers about emotional reactions to content we are working on, so it is a thing. However, assuming we are content to work on the file, the captioner or subtitler (or book editor) may not change the content. We are not the creators of the work.

I have two examples to discuss: translating and expletives.

I saw the HD Live Met presentation in the cinema of the fabulous opera Exterminating Angel by Thomas Adès. Although it is sung in English, surtitles** are provided, which is common for most major opera companies. With the exception of one title which might have caused confusion with an appositive due to the accompanying live shot, they were excellent. Until the climax of this dystopian nightmare story. There and in the last lines of the opera, in their characters’ terror the cast are singing a prayer: Libera me de morte aeterna et lux aeterna luceat, which translates to Deliver me from eternal death and let eternal light shine. The use of the Latin is intentional and very moving, because these words are excerpts from the Catholic Office of the Dead text. (If you know the movie or the opera, you’ll understand why these are used.) To my amazement, the Latin was not only not projected in the surtitles, it was replaced with the English as the Latin was being sung. This is unacceptable captioning.

While it is possible that the surtitle writer felt they were being “helpful” by providing the English, they shouldn’t have. First, they changed Adès’s and librettist Tom Cairns’s work fundamentally. They did not write that part in English for a reason. So, right off the bat, they made an editorial decision about an artist’s work. (If Adès or Cairns directed them to do so, I would happily stand corrected, but I doubt this very much. If the Met directed it, I would disagree with that decision.)

Captioners do not have the right to change art text: their responsibility is to make the piece as it stands accessible.

A caption editor (or book editor) knows to retain the original text.

Another reason this is not best practice is that it makes an editorial assumption about the audience: that they are not culturally savvy enough to know what these words mean, even if they aren’t Catholic. It would be deemed fairly common knowledge in the arts and literature audience to at least have a sense what the Latin was about, even if they couldn’t translate it word for word. So the surtitler decided who they were dealing with. (Again, if the Metropolitan Opera directed them to do it—well, my words would then be directed at them.) The composer knows who he will reach with the Latin and he knows how to best do it in that scene: with the atmospheric layer of using Latin. He does not dumb his libretto down for the audience.

The other thing that is wrong about this involves the Deaf/deaf/hard of hearing community. Did you know that some deaf people do go to and love the opera? My deafened friend loves opera: she said as long as the voices are big enough and surtitles are provided, she can attend and enjoy live opera and HD broadcasts. So the surtitler assumed it wouldn’t matter if the English were used (even if they did know deaf folks can go to the opera), and that is the type of trope the D/d/HoH community too often faces: they don’t matter. This is akin to the attitude of I’ll tell you later or Why can’t you just enjoy the beat? which I have tweeted about. If they are in the audience, they have the right to access the artistic work as it was created by the artist. It is not the surtitler’s right to even assume they won’t be in attendance, never mind that best practices wouldn’t apply to them. They cannot change an aspect of art because they figure an attendee won’t know anyway.

One final note about surtitles: there are various technological choices available, such as the old PowerPoint way, still used by some, and current surtitling software. These products can force certain style decisions for the surtitler. Also, some theatre and opera companies take divergent theoretical views of how far translations or same-language titles are to go. I belong to the more prescriptive school, obviously, and disapprove of general summarization.

Expletives in films or shows often bring up the issue of censorship—by whoever has the final word on content and house style. But the captioner/subtitler has a duty to at least present an argument (even if they don’t win people over) as to why potentially objectionable words must remain or at least be titled in a similar form.

It is the titler’s job to provide full access to the video product, with 95–100% accuracy for preprogrammed content

No matter what country you’re working in, standards of captioning/subtitling will all get at the point that it is the titler’s job to provide full access to the video product, with 95–100% accuracy for preprogrammed content. As in book editing, the titler must not edit the work to the point of changing content. So, if I’m a very conservative person, I may not decide to “fix” f-bombs or other offensive dialogue; even if I’m liberal personally, I must not “err on the side of caution” and tone down swear words in case a vulnerable audience is watching. I may be allowed, or indeed instructed, to use house style represent those f-bombs with nonsense characters, universally understood to mean expletives, but I may not choose to as a matter of my practice. I complain often about CCs on Netflix (see this article for a good chuckle), but I do appreciate that their style guideline says “Dialogue must never be censored.” They do retain expletives as used by onscreen characters. This is as it should be.

As Ada in Peaky Blinders (Season 1, Episode 2) says: Ada Shelby from Peaky Blinders is shouting to the projectionist behind her in a dimmed, empty cinema, Oi! I'm a Shleby too, you know. Put my fucking film back on!"

NB this incorrect caption should read: Oi! A native English speaker, especially one with British background (who would be the ideal choice as titler) would know this. Oy is an alternative.

*Expletives may have different treatment, based on house style, but they must still be retained in some form or another (even if it’s %^@##!).

**The word surtitles is a trademark of the Canadian Opera Company, where the practice and technology was developed. [Yay, Canada!] The general term is supertitles, but as most readers will be familiar with surtitles, I’ve used that in this article.

Re: top photo: Image not credited on original source https://www.sdopera.org/experience/supertitles

Bottom photo is a screenshot from the Peaky Blinders series as presented on Netflix.

Get Distributed

June 23, 2017December 12, 2017reelwords

Get Noticed for the Right Reasons

You've invested a lot of time, money and heart into making your film, show or video. You have big plans for distribution—whether it's worldwide or just to corporate headquarters. You can't afford to become one of those online memes because of errors.

Reel Words is the only subtitle editing company providing quality control for flawless English text because it's the only one with extensive editorial and titling experience behind it. Translators and transcribers are terrific at their craft but, like authors of books, they're not trained to review text for correctness, consistency and clarity.

Don't settle for error-ridden automated titles. Impress distributors or stakeholders with professional-looking, accurate subtitles or captions, and enjoy rave reviews from audiences by fulfilling the growing demand for No More Craptions!

What’s the Difference between Subtitles and Captions, Anyway?

June 18, 2017January 2, 2018reelwords

Fuzzy on the difference between subtitles and captions? We tend to use the terms fairly interchangeably, lumping them into some vague notions about "boring films" and closed captions on TV "for the deaf." But they are distinct animals, and here I'll share some straightforward info about the two, why the distinction matters, and why they're necessary.

Let's start chronologically, with subtitles. Before talkie films, silent films relied on cards with text shown for several frames, to insert dialogue or other information relevant to the story. Later (see the links provided under History to fill jump ahead), subtitles were introduced so that audiences of foreign films to translated the actors' words. Although helping hearing people understand the language, subtitles are also used in teaching scenarios, as visual reinforcement of the audio aids language acquisition.

Subtitles tend to be at the bottom centre of the screen (although that convention is changing in some productions), they can be turned off (they can be "closed"), and they never mention the onscreen audio language, although they may when another language is used in the action. They often are not used if the audio is considered common knowledge or if the word sounds the same in the translated language (e.g. a lot of languages use some form of the word "cool" or "okay"). Subtitled films can subsequently be captioned. You'll see why below.

Captions are intended for the Deaf, deaf, or hard of hearing, people with a variety of hearing issues (such as the ones I outlined in the here), and in situations that aid the hearing audience: noisy spaces or places where the sound has been turned off. They can be closed (optional) or open (embedded in the video). Sometimes their position moves to indicate who is speaking or that name can be explicitly shown, such as [VANESSA:] or >> TV anchor. They are usually in the same language as the audio and provide all utterances, tone of voice, atmospheric sounds or other effects. They can be added to subtitled work if this latter information needs to be conveyed for the CC audience.

The commonality is that both are often poorly written, or lack lustre at best. Many countries now have laws and regulations in effect to require that film productions and TV shows are distributed and broadcast with content that communicates with almost perfect verbatim accuracy and correct syntax, presentation, etc. That's where we come in.

Communication is a right, not a privilege.

In my work experience, subtitlers are professional translators and titlers who, despite their advanced training and skills, are hired at very low rates and with unreasonable turnarounds. It's no surprise, then, that they are too rushed to create a perfect file or that less trained people are awarded files. Unfortunately, subtitles are not considered important, seemingly something to slap on the end product to say it was done, without considering how their level of quality affects the viewer's immersion in the film. Which is counterproductive to critical and popular success, isn't it?

Closed captions are created with the same attitude (again, in my experience; others might have had better luck): captioners are typically not paid a living wage, and the speed at which they have to process material before broadcast encourages errors in spelling, grammar and written style. [However, house styles and extenuating circumstances in the material can force those shifts and they are then not errors.] Often they are hired largely based on keyboarding speed, and writing and editing training is erroneously considered irrelevant. When I captioned, the employees processing several shows or movies per day had no time or knowledge to be able to apply the editing I do, and the quality assurance supervisors were in the same boat.

So, while their form and function can be quite different, subtitles and captions both require editing. Google "caption errors" and the images that show up readily prove my point. No one is offering the editing Reel Words is, despite the very real need. And it's a shame because it is disrespectful of viewers who require the accessibility to fully participate in current culture and it ruins the enjoyment of audiences who love foreign films. Basically, the current state of affairs in subtitling and captioning is unacceptably abysmal.

The goal of all film storytellers is to keep their audiences completely immersed in the content; once attention is sidelined by errors, the flow is lost while the brain struggles to figure out what was (not) communicated and to keep up with the subsequent titles.
Our view is that we all deserve better—whether we are hearing or non-hearing. We expect outstanding CGI reults and online variety, but captions and subtitles are ignored. Part of the ethos of Reel Words is to advocate for actual improvement in standards, not just on the books. No More Craptions! may be lighthearted in tone, but the rallying cry is serious in vision.

Closed captions used to be considered a frill, and now they are required. Together, let's demand improvements in quality. If you are a producer, you can start by having your subtitle or caption file edited.

Photo source: frankieleon, let's compare apples and oranges, May 3, 2009 on Flickr.com

The Case for Subtitle Editing

June 15, 2017December 12, 2017reelwords

Colour photo of a cinema from the back row looking at a blank screen.

The explosion of access to international shows and films from independent filmmakers and from (S)VOD* suppliers like Netflix provides viewers with diverse and exciting choices. Many series and movies are outstanding. Except in one area.

If you hope to reach viewers around the globe, your production’s subtitles or captions must communicate flawlessly, and currently many are failing miserably.

You only have about 2 seconds per title to enable the viewer to absorb the content, so it needs to be picture-perfect.

What does picture-perfect mean in subtitling? It requires quality-control editing to catch more potential problem areas than you’d think. Recently, I did a survey of pitfalls in the final episode of a foreign TV series I’d been watching on Netflix. During that one episode, I documented 84 discrete errors—meaning 84 usage errors, not repeated occurrences like “hte” or even the possible multiple errors within one word or phrase.

At that rate, the reader stumbles due to incorrect subtitles about every 30 seconds and loses concentration on the dialogue.

By the time the brain has sorted out the discrepancy or compensated for misunderstanding, another title has flown by. Subtitles must facilitate viewer immersion.

The problems I found in the show I surveyed involved not just typos but also errors in spelling, grammar, punctuation, timing, capitalization, speaker identification and, most often, idiomatic usage.** Never mind missing titles or titling a character’s use of the English “Okay.” with “alright”. [Can you identify the 5 errors there?] A subtitle editor would catch and fix those.

Why does this happen? It’s probably not the subtitler’s/captioner’s fault. They work under extremely tight deadlines. Good translation takes time. The technology is intricate. And they are usually not briefed to copy edit—nor should they be: translation and copy editing for film are totally different skill sets.

Many shows are titled by people contracted to do the freelance work by companies that, frankly, want output quantity rather than quality. But if you’re working with a professional subtitler and translator, such as those affiliated with SUBTLE, the international Subtitlers’ Association (full disclosure: I’m a member), you are likely dealing with a highly trained and invested individual contractor or small company. Just like writers who need copy editors and proofreaders, as the filmmaker you may wish to hire a collaborative team: the translator/subtitler and the subtitle editor to check for idiomatic correctness. Did you know that “English” in print and film is edited by country? Editing English texts from Britain, the U.S., Canada and Australia requires education and experience in working with those countries’ conventions. Like all types of editing, to edit titles for film you need more than experience helping your friends with their resumes or teaching English for 20 years. You need formal training and ongoing professional development because “the rules” are always changing.

“Native speakers only” is not an adequate qualification requirement for captioning.

Subtitle editing is affordable because the subtitler has done the bulk of the work; the editing just cleans up the titles with a fresh pair of eyes and ensures that your long and expensive project is professional and truly accessible.

The goal of subtitles and captions is to communicate while making viewers forget they are reading titles. Good titling is as important as movie soundtracks: they should enhance the experience while being unnoticeable in the moment.

*(Subscription) Video on Demand

Photo by Daniel Olnes, February 14, 2008, Flickr.com

Subtitle Edit Draw

April 14, 2017June 26, 2017reelwords

Are you a filmmaker in Canada? Do you have a film made in a language other than English? You could win a subtitle edit of your transcribed captions or translated subtitles before your film’s release!

In celebration of National Canadian Film Day 150 (NCFD 150) #CanFilmDay on April 19, 2017, Wells Read Editing will hold a draw (via Random Picker, maximum 1000 entries) on April 26 for entries received by (re-)tweet with the hashtags #CanFilmDay #SubtitleEditDraw by 11:59pm EST on April 25. One winner will have one film’s English subtitles proofread, edited and checked for idiomatic correctness for FREE; two alternates will be generated by the software in case the winner cannot accept the prize.

Entrants do not have to be Canadian citizens but must be 18 years of age or older and able to provide current proof of residence, work/self-employment/film studies/amateur film making in Canada. Film length is not to exceed two hours, although work past 120 film minutes may be completed at regular fees; payment to be arranged and paid in advance; minutes begin with opening frame even if they are credit titles/visuals. Date of work fulfillment to be determined between editor and winner. Language of subtitles must be English, and Canadian, American, British or Australian conventions can be specified (depending on your intended market). For this draw’s prize, editing will not be embedded in the titling software or video file and will be completed by text document, screenshot PDFs with mark up or another mutually agreed-upon manner. Film credits will include reference to “Subtitle Editing by Wells Read Editing.”

To enter, tweet #CanFilmDay #SubtitleEditDraw to @vwellseditor

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