Captions or subtitles?
Captions and subtitles have seen a noticeable rise in popularity lately, in the last few years, thanks also to streaming platforms. Non-native speakers around the world love, more and more, to consume videos and films in their original languages, rather than their dubbed versions.
Usually, you can choose between watching a video with subtitles or with closed captions (CC). There is a clear distinction between subtitles and captions. Subtitles are written translations of the dialogues, narrations, or spoken parts of a video, whose aim is to guide non-native speakers by following the spoken parts with an accurate rendering of their sense.
Closed captions are designed as an accessibility tool for deaf and hard of hearing individuals. They help these viewers by providing text that not only transcribes dialogues but also describes background noises or important sounds in the film or video being watched. These on-screen texts are created from the audio and aim to help the viewer visualize the sounds occurring in specific scenes, such as [birds chirping] or [eerie noises in the distance].
In my personal experience, to watch a movie in English with English subs often means to opt for the closed captions, which oftentimes is the only available option, since the English subtitles one is more and more incorporated to the CCs.
This tendency though raises a very unheard-of problem (no pun intended).
It would be great if Deaf and hard-hearing people actually benefited from satisfactory, well-curated textual descriptions of sounds, right? Well, what I found out is that, unfortunately, just because closed captions exist, it doesn’t mean that they actually help the audience they were created for.
I don’t like having to go for the CCs to watch my favourite films or series, because some of the captions are so poorly written that sometimes they even ruin the mood of certain scenes. I remember this climactic scene in which the two main characters were realising they didn’t love each other anymore. It was a very dramatic moment, full of heavy silence with some imperceptible white noise in the back. At the apex of the drama, the CCs went [birds chirping].
It made the scene pathetic and low-key hilarious.
If you're thinking, "That was an unusual choice by the director," let me clarify - no. The sound of "birds chirping" was intentionally subtle, and I wouldn't have noticed it if I hadn't read the closed captions. It was a sound that had significance in earlier scenes, just before that dialogue.
For me, it was just a small disturbance, but for someone with hearing difficulties, it could have led to a total misunderstanding of the scene. They might have interpreted it as a bittersweet and ironic moment, but in reality, the chirping birds were not significant enough to be mentioned in the captions.
This made me think: does the entertainment industry neglect its deaf and hard of hearing audiences? The answer is: hell yes!
Words of change
Imagine being a non-hearing person from birth (if you are one, then feel welcome to comment on Instagram what you think of this article!) and watching a film which starts with the caption [Harry Potter theme song playing]. How are you supposed to know what that means? You have never heard that song, so you can't relate to the mood it sets for the scene. Or, imagine being hard of hearing and watching a biopic about Mozart, where every time he plays the piano, you see "[piano plays]". How can you fully enjoy a movie like that?
You probably can’t.
This food for thoughts came to my attention thanks to this Berlin-based, American artist called Christine Sun Kim. In the short video I watched, [Closer Captions], Kim provides us with the point of view of Deaf people having to cope with captions completely neglecting their sensorial experience of films. Not only does she denounce how captions like [wind howling] or [music playing] can be extremely exclusive for the people they were initially meant for, but also provides a quite creative –and beautiful– solution.
Synaesthesia and poetry
What Christine Sun Kim elaborates in her project [Closer Captions] is that CCs could become a powerful poetic language that finally takes into account the issue of describing sounds to Deaf people. By writing closed captions that describe sounds with synaesthesia, the artist gifts with splendid images both deaf and hearing people.
It is quite obvious now that she made me notice it, but it never came to my mind before: how is a deaf person supposed to know how an owl sounds, and therefore: how is a deaf person supposed to relate to the eerie sensation of hearing owls hooting in the distance in a dark, gloomy night in the forest?
Instead of transcribing the literal description of the sounds in a very hearing-centric perspective, why not try to describe them with the help of other senses? We have synaesthesia, the literary device that blends different sense modalities: why don’t we use poetry, instead of mood-killing, approximate words?
Here’s some of the artist’s closed caption for a video that features only sounds:
It might appear, to hearing people, that this option for films or series could be a bit invasive, distracting, or too dependent on the transcriber’s own interpretation of the images. However, I think that these captions are pure poetry, and this poetry in particular does not only allow Deaf and hard-hearing people to enjoy art, but also adds-up to hearing people’s experience, by guiding them through a way of relating to those who experience the world differently. And if you don’t like them, you can always turn them off.
I can’t wait to hear read from this artist again.