subtitles, captions, and something about semiotics

My aunt, uncle, and two of my cousins are deaf on my mom's side of the family. In preparing the DVD of The Lionshare, I realized it would become necessary to create a subtitle track so that they would be able to watch it.

A quick google search revealed to me all the ins and outs of subtitling in DVD Studio Pro. I decided to play around a bit and see how it might work out. It was then that I realized that there are a million issues at play here.

Firstly, the obvious (or maybe not-so-obvious) stuff. As someone who has seen plenty of foreign films subtitled I thought I knew the basics. Text should appear in a sans-serif typeface with a black outline to stand out against the picture. When characters speak the text should appear relative to their location on screen. It occurred to me that maybe there are some kind of standardized rules for use of italics, dashes to denote different character dialog, etc. I decided to look it up. Not only do I want to do a good job for the benefit of my extended family, but now I was interested.

In the US and Canada there is a distinction between subtitles and closed captions. Closed captions assume the viewer is hard of hearing. Subtitles assume the viewer can hear but does not understand the language of the program. So closed captions would not bother translating, say, the text of a sign. Subtitles would, because the sign (presumably) is in another language. Closed captions make note of sound effects and music cues; subtitles do not, because there's no language barrier there. Interesting stuff.

Another technical difference between closed captions and subtitles is, traditionally, closed captions refer specifically to a sub-signal of text broadcast concurrently with programming. You used to need a special box to decode the signal for captions, but today all TVs have it built in. Also, the 'closed' part of closed captions refers to the option to opt-in or out of the captioning. IE, it's a closed system. So, technically, that means the subtitle track on a DVD is also 'closed'.

For my purposes, I am going to combine characteristics of both for my subtitles. I am going to include text for sound effects and music, because I assume that if you turn on the english subtitles for an english language program, it means you are deaf or hard of hearing. Come to think of it, that's probably the norm. But I don't really know.

I was looking for some kind of guide for caption/subtitle etiquette. In other words, is there a standard usage for italics? If there is, my deaf family would be familiar with that, and I don't want to confuse them. Turns out there really doesn't seem to be a definitive approach. One guy says you should only use italics for off-screen dialog, such as narration, and nothing else. But I'm pretty sure I've seen it used to indicate the speech of a second character. I was also confused about the use of dashes to denote different character speech in the same shot. There doesn't seem to be a ruling on this. There seem to be some strong opinions about what is 'right' and 'wrong', but it seems like no matter what I do, it'll break somebody's rules.

But here's where things get really interesting. In transcribing my own movie, I have the opportunity to recontextualize it. I can subtly alter the language of the dialog. I can place more emphasis on certain points or phrases. This is almost unconscious. I can choose to indicate certain sounds and not others. This is not as straightforward as you might think. Because of the loose style of the movie, there is a lot of overlapping dialog, colloquialisms, grunting/muttering, etc. Stuff that doesn't really have consequence. But shouldn't I include it not matter what? I mean, it's there, and I want my deaf family to have as close to the same experience as hearing people do as possible. But there are instances when I feel including certain 'non-dialog-dialog' in the captioning would give it weight it wasn't meant to have. It's just there because it sounds natural, but when it appears in text, it's given more importance and changes the meaning. So it's not so clear-cut.

Strange things come up, like whether to spell 'cum' like the porn sites do it or like 'come' that seems to me like some strangely sanitized explicitness. Is it equally as shocking to read 'come' as it is 'cum'? But do I want it to be shocking? There's a lot of control in that subtle difference.

Plus there's the issue of sound quality overall. Because this was a production with extremely limited resources, some of the sound recording isn't the best. Some dialog has a different quality than in other scenes. Some lines aren't as loud or clean as I'd like. But for my deaf family this is a non-issue. The lines will appear as clearly as everything else. Sound, which is what separates the men from the boys in film production, is a non-issue for them. It will not weigh into their reading of the film at all.

Basically, there's a lot more at play here when you start getting down to it. I'm sure deaf people are caption-saavy, and they know how to interpret the different conventions in use in captions and subtitles. So I'll just do my best and trust that their smarts will make up for my deficiencies as a transcriber.

Tables are Inconsequential

I am having a hell of time trying to make a new website for my movie, The Lionshare. I want it to be simple. The way I taught myself how to design a layout for a website, all those years ago, was through HTML tables. This is verboten. Tables were not meant for layouts. In fact, tables killed the web.

I understand what they're saying, mostly. CSS is far more efficient for web layouts, in terms of amount of code (though I don't see why that argument holds so much weight in the age of broadband internet). CSS is meant for layout, and the possibilities are great. Tables are meant to display tabulated data, and website layouts using tables are, in actuality, using a very roundabout way to do what it's trying to do and are very limited in doing so.

My problem is this is not how I learned to regard tables. I learned to layout my websites with tables. In fact, I found it quite freeing, back in 1999 through 2003. I get the concept of CSS, but I'm having difficulty retraining my mind to think of design in terms of CSS.

I want a really simple website for right now. I really do. The problem is I feel pressure from the net elite to make my website the 'right' way. But in trying to CSS it I get bogged down and frustrated. I want to concentrate on content.

Maybe I should just take the advice I heard last night: an inconsequential difference is no difference at all. For my purposes, tables vs. CSS is inconsequential.