Interview: AirTalk with Larry Mantle
This was my first live interview! I’ve been interviewed for several podcasts, but they’re always edited. Larry Mantle’s AirTalk show on LA’s NPR affiliate discusses many different topics and invites special guests to present on the issues, and then callers either call in their question or email them. I was asked to join a segment called “Why More People Are Binging With The Subtitles On And What It Means For A Booming Industry,” which was inspired by this Hollywood Reporter article. The first special guest was Jodene Antoniou, Managing Director of Capital Captions Typing Services in the UK. I was next, and in the opening question from Larry, was able to talk about why subtitles are not necessarily direct transcriptions of the dialog. This is because people can’t read as fast as they can understand spoken dialog, so the subtitles are simplified. Listen to the interview below, and jump to the 9:25 mark if you 100%want to skip to my section. The course mentioned in the interview is “Subtitling for Streaming: Learn the Industry Standards,” and is available for a limited time for $59 in case you want to learn the art of subtitling yourself! Note that my audio in the clip below has been re-recorded due to the phone-quality original recording…
Transcript
Larry: It’s AirTalk on LAist 89.3. NPR’s “Here and Now” is coming up momentarily. We’ll have the latest on that NATO summit in Lithuania. News is being made of course and you’ll be hearing it from NPR and then that’s followed at noon by Fresh Air, Terry Gross interviews her cohost Tanya Mosely, that should be interesting to hear, and that’s at noon, Fresh Air with Terry and Tanya right here on. LAist 89.3. Right now we’re talking about subtitles and captioning of the productions we see on streaming services and on television networks and the popularity of those, how it’s grown and the business of that. With so many more productions that are made every year, has commensurately grown as well. Joining us from Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, a professor there of the private graduate school, Max Troyer. He teaches a “Subtitling for Streaming” course that gives video producers the basics on how to create subtitles. Professor Troyer, thank you for joining us.
Max: Thanks for inviting me.
Larry: What are a few of the things that are central to the course that you teach to helping people understand the nuances and the challenges of subtitling?
Max: This is something people often complain about when they notice the subtitles are different and don’t correspond to the dialog. This is due to the fact that people generally can’t read as fast as they can understand someone talk. So we have to simplify the dialog so that it can be understood in the time that they have to read it on the screen.
Larry: Interesting. I didn’t realize that. So that’s why people feel like they’re they’re missing something. So that’s that’s an artistic call in many cases. How do you help producers make that call?
Max: It’s something that I cover in my course, how to train subtitlers. It’s not something you can just take someone off the street make them a subtitler. You have to learn all of the best practices for how to take dialog and transform it into a subtitle. There’s obviously transcription involved in that, converting the dialog into written text and then doing what is called spotting, which is taking the dialog and placing it on the timeline. Chunking it up into the individual subtitles and simplifying the texts as necessary to comply with the studio’s best practices or reading requirements.
Larry: And share with this with live captioning where we’re watching a news or sports event, a news conference, an award show where it’s not scripted, it’s happening live. How is that done?
Max: In many cases, live broadcasts are fully scripted. News programs are even scripted. If you look at the Emmys and the Oscars, a lot of the content is scripted in advance. And the subtitlers have access to that, there’s definitely live content though, and the subtitlers who do that live captioning are closely related to courtroom stenographers who are using specialized keyboards to quickly type in the live dialog. That’s when you see those errors that are introduced because they’re flying by the seat of their pants and trying to keep up. You’ll notice this when the captioning is delayed by a couple of seconds or a sentence or two behind.
Larry: And also, you know, speaking of that issue of pace, I know that with the subtitle you’re trying to make it match with what’s being said on screen. You don’t necessarily want readers to get to the punch line before it’s being said by the person on screen that the timing is important. So in the work that you do with your course, how do you help producers understand how to time out the ways that the subtitles are displayed and also make that work with the reading rate of the typical viewer?
Max: In my course, I focus on the Netflix subtitling guidelines since they’re published and they’re really well-written and easy to understand. Netflix recommends that a subtitle follow the rhythm of the video, and that’s when we introduce the Art of Subtitling. When you are chaining multiple subtitles together, it’s up to the subtitler to decide where to split sentences that keep logical ideas together that don’t split up names onto multiple lines, keep adjectives with nouns and things like that. As you know, most subtitles are limited to one or two lines. We never go on to three lines, and they’re almost always at the bottom of the screen, which we refer to as the lower thirds part of the screen, except when there is on onscreen text or a title in the way that the title can move to the top of the screen temporarily.
Larry: We’re talking with Max Troyer, who’s a professor at Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. It’s a graduate school, and he teaches subtitling for streaming course there. Sophia in Highland Park says, “how do you transcribe someone with a thick accent who may be hard to understand?” How do you know that you’re being accurate? Max?
Max: Most of the transcription is now done using AI, which has gotten good enough to handle almost all dialog. But I agree with Jodene, a human definitely needs to intervene and whip that dialog into shape for subtitling purposes. Any time there’s a super thick accent, you would definitely need to have a human in the loop at a bare minimum, and it may be just as easy to hand the entire process over to a human who can understand the accent.
Larry: Janet in Culver City emailed, “I was recently on a plane watching the movie ‘Game Night.’ Closed captioning was on. When the actors swore, the swear words were replaced audibly with non swear words.” So in other words, they were dubbed with non swear words, “but the closed captions still had the actual swear word spelled out.” It sort of defeats the point, doesn’t it? Max, have you ever seen that happening?
Max: How interesting! I know that the airline industry has special requirements for any movies that appear on an airplane, but I do know that for example at Netflix the teams that cover subtitling and dubbing are different and don’t always work closely together. There’s obviously a disconnect because probably the subtitles should have been edited along with the dialog.
Larry: And I want to go back to our our guest. We were talking with earlier from Capitol Captions, Jodene Antonio. Jodene, and just before we go, clearly this has benefits for kids learning to read, doesn’t it? Close caption and subtitle even children’s programing.
Jodene: Yeah. I mean, when you watch subtitles, I mean it just generally increases the amount of focus that you have on the content that you’re watching. And I’ve had conversations before. I have a son who’s ten years old, and he actually wears hearing aids, so he always uses the subtitles anyway. And but we found out recently most, most of the children that he goes to school with also watch subtitles. And some of them watch watch shows like Friends or other sitcoms that are probably a bit older that now I remember when I was younger, I would get away with watching, but they were asking quite uncomfortable questions to their parents…
Larry: …and no one would hear it play. Thank you so much, Max and Jodene, I appreciate it. Have a terrific rest of your day from all of us at AirTalk, I’ll be back with you tomorrow at 9.
