Subtitling or captioning

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This page is for Subtitling or captioning; adding single-language or bi-lingual sub-titles to videos.

The terms 'Sub-titles' and 'Captions'

The public tends to use the term 'Sub-titles' (general) or 'Closed-captions' (for the hard of hearing) for the text version of the on-screen dialog. In the video/movie/TV industries, they use the term 'Captions. The process of adding them is called 'Captioning'.

Overview of sub-titles or captions

See Wikipedia: Captioning and Wikipedia: Closed captioning.


Uses for sub-titles or captions

  • Single language (original language) - For the hard of hearing.
  • Single language (original language) - To help people who speak English as a second language.
  • Single language (original language) - For interviews with people with strong accents.
  • Single language (different language) - For people who don't speak the original language (instead of dubbing the speech).
  • Dual-language - For people learning a second language, such as English, French, etc.

Adding sub-titles or captions

This is done by a language expert on a computer using specialized captioning software. See Wikipedia: Captioning

Open-source software

All the software used to add captions must be open-source. One such program is Aegisub

When to add sub-titles

Sub-titles can be added at the time the video is made or later. The person doing the sub-titles needs all the help and information they can get. For OLPC, it would be good to have a website where scripts are stored, for those videos that are scripted. It could also store pre-production notes for both scripted and non-scripted videos.

Translating the sub-titles into another language

It would be useful to find/write some software to extract the original-language sub-titles from a video (or seperate file), together with the time-code giving the time-position and frame-number in the video where each sentence occurs. The software could also create an auto-translated version of each sentence, which can then be added to the video pictures and checked and corrected manually.

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