TV Subtitles are rubbish and misleading

munchpot

Krojan - I think your post is spot on. I always find that people who complain about subtitling errors are people who don't need / rely on them

The actual requirements are for subtitles to relay the essence of what's happening - they are not supposed to be an exact transcript of the programme

shebangs

........................

kbrumann

Imagine typing a transcript of the conversation. That is quite hard, always somewhat behind and prone to errors.

munchpot

If you are interested in what broadcasters have to do then the Code On Television Access Services can be read here

If you want to see what each broadcaster has to do each year that information is available too. This is last years report

Arthurian

I think they are hysterically funny. The voice recognition software seems to default to proper names, so for example, the weather forecast of "snow on any hills" became "snow on Benny Hill's", but it seems they do watch out for this and leap in to correct manually.

They do a decent job which is appreciated, especially now most people have new flat screen TVs which produce less than stellar sound. And, it seems to me, now more interviews are conducted with people who haven't quite mastered good enough English pronunciation.

vyle

A couple of weeks ago on watchdog, anne said something like "You can contact us of course" and it was subbed as "You can contact us for Lulz."

What gets me is how even if something then gets re-broadcast, all the errors are left in. And it's worse for things like Click where the product names end up going totally wrong, or you get something like this:

http://i.imgur.com/t1vJy.jpg

And even some stuff, like The Apprentice gets live subtitles even though it's recorded months in advance.

missesther

One of my favourite subtitling moments came when I was watching "Border Force" (or something similar) and they'd caught three people for drug trafficking or something and the officer was repeating their names and the last names were bleeped out, except the subtitles kept it in! In which case - I know who you are, you drug traffickers, you!! And anyone else watching with subtitles.

Wish Lovefilm's online streaming did subtitles, I can never hear when I'm drying my hair and watching.

fozmcfc

I remember down the gym where the TV's are muted, they asked a woman why she was selling some items she said "I needed the money" but it come up as "I needed the bunny" which made me laugh.

augustsmummy

The best error I saw was the designer Gucci being written as "goo shay". This was on a replay in the early hours.

GemJar_2

I was watching a police program the other day and they were bleeping out the names of some suspects but they were coming up on the subtitles!