So, if Matt Baker says “Hello and welcome to The One Show” amongst a backdrop of applause, there'll be a single subtitler somewhere clearly repeating “Hello and welcome to The One Show” into a microphone. It’s a hybrid system – one that relies on a computer and subtitler. It's basically what you’re thinking: as the likes of newsreaders and presenters talk on TV, one of the designated 200 English-speaking subtitlers from across the globe will sit in front of a microphone repeating whatever’s said on air.ĭoing this means a clear voice, free of any background noise, can be processed by specialised audio recognition software that generates captions on the screen. Live TV shows – and a lot of pre-recorded ones too, especially the ones that get edited close to their broadcast time like Have I Got News for You – get their captions through a technique called ‘respeaking’. ![]() Okay then, so how’s subtitling actually done? The approximately 200 million words subtitled live every year on BBC channels? The captions that are now generated for almost 100% programmes? They’re crafted by an army of subtitlers, people with one of the weirdest – and most challenging – jobs in TV. And the Syntipatico system – the one that created subtitles for ‘Tweezer May’ in BBC comedy W1A? It, alongside any fully automated system, doesn’t actually exist. They're not just IT nerds accustomed to enjoying a fourth coffee break as a dust-covered computer spews out captions in the corner. Reason two: being a subtitler is really hard. It turned out that the mistake actually lay with a single faulty TV – one busted set had carried over subtitles from CBBC's The Dumping Ground to BBC News. That was, as Trump himself would say, fake news. Remember when everyone thought the BBC used ‘the wrong subtitles’ during the US presidential inauguration last year? The first: sometimes subtitlers' mistakes simply aren’t. ![]()
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