It may the true that not everyone needs to read subtitles when watching a film or television programme, but subtitling is a service that we have all benefited from. It is not just the fact that we may need foreign dialogue translated, it is also that we may be in a place unable to hear clearly, such as an airport or train station waiting lounge, for example. We may even have to keep the volume on our television sets low so as not to disturb someone close by who needs to concentrate. So, we read the subtitles on the screen and allow them to get their work done in the most effective way. The fact is there are a myriad of situations where the service is useful. That is why, for the modern broadcaster, it is impossible to consider operating without including the range of subtitle, caption and audio description services that have become so prevalent today. And for that reason, subtitle and closed captions software has become very significant, helping not just the hearing impaired but the general viewership too. Meanwhile, audio description software is widely considered to be equally essential, allowing the visually impaired to enjoy broadcasts. Each of these software packages has made the process of getting text or audio, onto the screen or into the programme as quickly and efficiently as technologically possible. The process is itself highly complex, with subtitles and captions needing to be created, encoded, transcoded, inserted and then transmitted. But thanks to modern software, this can be accomplished with relative ease, with clearly organised interfaces allowing for swift and efficient processing, at the click of a mouse. However, this is almost incomparable to the earliest methods used to produce subtitles. Of course, this extends to a century ago, in the first decade of the film industry when the silver screen showed actors moving their lips, but with no sound emerging from them. Something had to be done to tell the viewers of these early cinematic creations what was being said. For a time, actors were used off screen to read the dialogue aloud, in a kind of early dubbing service, but from 1903 the first real subtitles, known then as intertitles, appeared when descriptive titles were drawn, filmed and inserted between sequences in the film Uncle Toms Cabin. However, in 1909 a second method was devise, which projected the subtitles onto a screen beside the film, meaning that the action sequences did not have to be interrupted. With the arrival of sound in 1927, finding a way to show subtitles that could keep up with event on screen instead of interrupt them, became a matter of urgency, and, in 1929, The Jazz Singer was shown in Paris with French subtitles. This was accomplished by holding a frame in which the title was printed with the film negative and positive print strip exposed. But this method had its problems, with distracting noise created and the image losing focus. In the 1930s, chemical processes began to be used. A paraffin coating was applied to the emulsion side of the film and the subtitles, in typesetting, were heated to 100 degrees and, via a type of printing press, were burned into the paraffin. A bleach bath burned the exposed emulsion, while the remaining paraffin was washed away. The result was a white, but quite legible, subtitle. This technique was used right up to the 1950s, but in later decades the typesetting was replaced by phototype setting. By the 1980s, the chemical process had advanced to a stage where printing was not necessary at all, as it had become replaced by lasers that were controlled by a computer. The lasers would vaporise the emulsion on the film, creating perfectly shaped lettering. Meanwhile, the development of time coding on video meant that the subtitles could be positioned with greater accuracy. Today,
subtitling methods are even faster and more accurate than those of the past. Advances in computer technology have seen a rapid development of software that feature simple interfaces, clear and user friendly presentations, icon dragging and, with everything saved on a video server, can be easily accessed for near immediate use. Where once the whole process took weeks of painstakingly burning subtitles into the film, frame by frame, now even live broadcasts can feature accurate text on screen thanks to subtitle and
closed captions software and, while
audio description software serves the needs to those who cannot see.
