JAN IVARSSON:

A SHORT TECHNICAL HISTORY OF SUBTITLES IN

EUROPE
It was not long after the invention of film that efforts were first made to convey the dialogue
of the actors to the audience. They started with what we now call intertitles: texts, drawn or
printed on paper, filmed and placed between sequences of the film. They were first seen in
1903 as epic, descriptive titles in Edwin S. Porter's Uncle Tom's Cabin. (The technique may
have been invented by cartoonist and filmmaker J. Stuart Blackton.) The titles were from 1909
on called sub-titles, as they were used in the same way as subtitles in for instance a newspaper.
Early, but rarely, the subtitles were placed in the moving image, for instance as in Porter's
College Chums (1907) or the French films Judex (1916) or Mireille (1922). (College Chums
was sometimes shown with live actors speaking the dialogue behind the projection screen!)

In the era of intertitles, it was easy to solve the translation problem. The original titles were
removed, translated, filmed and re-inserted. Or a speaker was used to give a simultaneous
interpretation of the intertitles, the French bonimenteur or the Japanese benshi.

In fact, the very first “subtitles” in the modern sense saw the light of day already during the
silent film era. In 1909 M. N. Topp registered a patent for a “device for the rapid showing of
titles for moving pictures other than those on the film strip”. With this method the projectionist,
using a sciopticon (a kind of slide projector), showed the subtitles on the screen below the
intertitles. However, this was never much more than a curiosity, although similar techniques,
with the titles on a film strip instead of slides, have been used from time to time up to the
present day (Brant, p. 30).

From intertitles to subtitles

From the year 1927 on, with the invention of sound film, the audience could hear the actors,
so the titles inserted between scenes disappeared and the problem assumed new dimensions.
Of course, one could make several language versions, or have the film post-synchronized
(dubbed) in another language. However, some film producers and distributors found this
technique complex and expensive.

Why not use titles as before, inserting them in the picture? They thus became what we now
call subtitles, and since this technique is comparatively cheap (subtitling only costs between a
tenth and a twentieth of a dubbing), it became the preferred method in the smaller language
areas, such as the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries.

In the early days of film subtitling the main problem was to place the subtitles on the
distribution copies, as the negative was usually in safe keeping in the country of origin.
Norway, Sweden, Hungary and France quickly took the lead in developing techniques for
subtitling films. However, "the first attested showing of a sound film with subtitles was when
The Jazz Singer (originally released in the US in October 1927) opened in Paris, on January 26,
1929, with subtitles in French. Later that year, Italy followed suit, and on August 17, 1929,
another Al Jolson film, The Singing Fool, opened in Copenhagen, fitted with Danish subtitles."
(Gottlieb, p. 216)

The optical method

To start with, attempts were made to breathe new life into the technique invented in 1909, i.e.
manual projection of slides with printed texts directly onto the screen, but very soon, methods
of copying photographed titles on to the film copy itself came into use. A frame containing the
title was kept in position while the film negative and the positive print strip were fed forward
and exposed.

Later on this process was made automatic. Exposed “blank” frames were inserted between the
title frames and the titles were fed forward by means of a counter to ensure that the subtitles
were the right length and came in the right place.

One problem with the method was that, since the original film negative was usually not
available, it was necessary to re-copy the whole film to obtain a new negative, with a
consequent loss of focus and substantial increase in the noise level—a serious drawback in the
early days of sound films.

But sometimes the film negative could be obtained, and it was soon realized that, if a large
number of copies were required, the most efficient method was to photograph the titles onto a
separate film of the same length as the original, with the in and out cue frames synchronized
with the sound.

The film negative and the roll with the titles were then copied simultaneously, an operation
which took much less time than repeating the slow exposure procedure frame by frame.

Film subtitling using mechanical and thermal processes

In 1930 a Norwegian inventor, Leif Eriksen, took out a patent for a method of stamping titles
directly on to the images on the film strip, first moistening the emulsion layer to soften it. The
titles were typeset, printed on paper and photographed to produce very small letterpress type
plates for each subtitle (the height of each letter being only about 0.8 mm). Later, in 1935, a
Hungarian inventor, O. Turchányi, registered a patent for a method whereby the plates were
heated to a sufficiently high temperature to melt away the emulsion on the film without the
need for a softening bath. However, both these processes were difficult to control and results
often erratic, with poorly defined letters. Despite the drawbacks, this technique has been used
by some film laboratories in eastern Europe, Asia and South America up to the present day.

The chemical process

In 1932 R. Hruska, an inventor in Budapest, and Oscar I. Ertnæs in Oslo (later in Stockholm)
simultaneously took out patents on an improved technique for impressing the titles directly on
the film copies.
A very thin coating of wax or paraffin was applied to the emulsion side of the finished film
copy. The printing plates were placed in a kind of printing press, into which each plate was fed
and heated to a temperature of nearly a hundred degrees and one by one pressed against the
paraffin coating at the bottom of the frame which corresponded to the beginning of the dialogue
line. The paraffin under the letters melted and was displaced, exposing the emulsion. This
process was repeated with all the frames on which this subtitle was to appear, corresponding
to the duration of the speech. The same procedure was carried out with the next subtitle and so
on throughout the film.

After the printing process the film was put through a bleach bath, which dissolved the exposed
emulsion, leaving only the transparent nitrate or acetate film. The etching fluid and the paraffin
were then washed away. This process produced clearly legible white letters on the screen,
although the edges of the letters were slightly ragged due to the variable consistency of the
paraffin and variations in the penetration of the etching fluid.

Later on, this process too was automated by means of a counter, which fed the plates forward,
counted the frames on the roll and ensured that the subtitles came in the right place and were
of the right length.

This was the cheapest process when less than ten copies of a film were to be subtitled.

The chemical and optical processes described above are still used in many countries, more or
less as before, except that the plate making process has been modernized. In the early days the
titles were typeset (usually with a Linotype machine), printed on paper, photographed and then
plates were made for each set. Later, with the adoption of new techniques in the printing
industry, came phototype setting (e.g. Cinétype) and still later computerized typesetting.
Nowadays computers are used for the production of the titles themselves, and they can be time
coded and “simulated” on a videocassette for proofreading purposes.

The Norwegian-Swedish film laboratories Filmtekst in Oslo, Ideal Film in Stockholm and the
Kagansky brothers’ Titra-Film in Paris held the most important patents, as a result of which
they dominated the European subtitling market from 1933 right up to the mid-50s and were
very important also on other continents. (According to interviews given by O. Ertnaes’s
daughter and Mme Nina Kagansky, Paris. See also Brant, pp. 53-63. Her thesis contains a
detailed description of all the stages in both the optical and chemical processes.)

Laser subtitling

The latest development in this field is the use of lasers to burn away or vaporize the emulsion.
This makes both typesetting and plates unnecessary. The technique has been developed by
Denis Auboyer in Paris and by Titra-Film in Paris and Brussels and has, with great success,
been in commercial use since 1988.

In this process a computer controls a very narrow laser beam, in the same way as in a modern
typesetting machine, i.e. the beam virtually writes the text in such a way as to result in
vaporization of the emulsion without damage to the acetate film underneath. It takes the beam
less than a second to write a subtitle consisting of two lines, after which the next frame is fed
forward. Where no subtitles are to appear the film is fast-wound to the next operative frame.
The sharpness of the letters is excellent, the contours being enhanced by a slight shading caused
by the darkening of the edges due to the heat.

The titles themselves are computer typeset and can be cued on the video display by means of
time coding or frame counting.

Laser subtitling is cheaper than the chemical process, but requires costly investment in
equipment. However, the method is highly automated and needs very little personnel.

Subtitling for television

Films for the cinema were soon shown on television. On August 14, 1938, the BBC broadcast
Arthur Robison’s Der Student von Prag in a subtitled version. (This was probably also the first
scheduled showing of a film in the history of television.)

But it was soon discovered that the prints with subtitles intended for the cinema caused a
number of problems. The titles, legible enough in the cinema, were very difficult to read on
the television screen. One reason for this is the difference in the speed at which the audience
can read subtitles on television as compared with the cinema, but the main reason is that the
picture on a TV set has a narrower contrast range than that on a cinema screen. What was
needed, therefore, was a method for incorporating subtitles produced for television into untitled
film copies or video tapes.

Optical film subtitles for television

In countries where the optical process was used for subtitling films, attempts were made to use
the existing subtitle film strip and run it in parallel with the original untitled film in a second
film scanner. The title images were mixed electronically into the film images so that it looked
to the viewers as if the titles were on the film, except that it was now possible to control the
whiteness of the letters. If a roll with subtitles was not available, one could be ordered from a
company that made subtitles for films. This method is still used occasionally today.

At about the same time work started on the development of a rather crude, but cheap and
reliable, optical subtitling process for television: The titles were typed on paper and then one-
frame stills of each title were made with a film camera. The resulting film negative was put in
a scanner and then either the translator fed in the titles manually, one at a time, synchronizing
them with the programme, or an automatic system was used to feed in the titles, more or
(usually) less reliably, with the help of punched-out marks on the edge of the film.

The title images (usually with white letters against a black background, a “letter box”, the
whiteness and blackness being controlled to ensure optimum readability) were mixed into the
programme images and transmitted or taped. Where no subtitles were to appear, exposed
frames—blank frames—were placed between the subtitle frames.

Quite soon, some improvements were made on this method. For example, the titles were
printed with more attractive proportional typefaces on offset composers, i.e. simple
typographical setting machines which also allowed the use of italics and kerning, squeezing
the letters together. The titles could be written on punch cards, inserted in a feed mechanism
and either photographed onto a roll of film or displayed live using a TV camera with image
inversion (black shown as white and vice versa). This “rapid subtitling” method was used
mainly for news items. Thus, photographing the subtitles and developing the film were no
longer necessary, but the feeding system was unreliable: sometimes the machine supplied
several cards at a time or none at all.

Both these techniques allowed manual feeding of the subtitles during recording or transmission
or, as with film subtitling, automatic feeding by means of a frame counter.

Caption generators

When caption generators of various types (such as Aston, Capgen, Logica, Vidifont) started to
be used to insert captions in the television image by electronic means, this made it possible to
generate subtitles directly in the transmitted picture itself.

However, caption generators, which were intended for various kinds of captions or titles and
offered a wide range of typographical variation, proved impractical for subtitling in large
quantities. They were difficult to operate, their word processing functions were very
rudimentary, and above all they were extremely expensive.

Subtitling equipment

It was therefore only natural that efforts should be made to produce dedicated subtitling
equipment, and this was achieved in the 1970s, more or less simultaneously in several places.
Two main systems were developed, both based on the use of a word processor with a special
subtitling program which made it possible to write the subtitles in a form identical to that
shown on the television screen.

The first system is based on the teletext principle (Oracle, from the U.K., and Antiope, from
France, are two examples). A computer generates concealed signals in the image data, in
response to which a simple character generator in the receiver creates the characters and mixes
them into the television picture when a specified teletext page is selected.

The second system uses a computer-controlled character generator in the transmitter—much

less sophisticated and much cheaper than a caption character generator—and when the subtitler
cues in a new subtitle, the characters are generated by electronic means and mixed into the
transmitted image. Such systems are e.g. the BBC TV’s Television Electronic Characters
(TEC) system from 1976, the SVT–TeleEkonomi’s system, which came into operation in
1981, and the Screen Electronic system, from about the same time.

Time codes

But why feed the titles manually when time codes, which have so many other functions in
television, could do the job?
When a video tape is time coded, a “clock” is recorded on the tape which tells you to the nearest
1/25 of a second when a particular frame will appear on the screen. This time code can be read
while the video tape is running and used to start or stop some process, e.g. to show a selected
subtitle, as desired.

Soon further advances were made, which made it possible to install the complete subtitling
system on a personal computer, thus allowing the subtitler to carry out the whole job, including
the cueing of the subtitles in the right place in the programme, in a continuous operation and
in his own home or office.

REFERENCES:

Brant, Rosemary (1984), The History and Practice of French Subtitling, Paper. Univ. of Texas,
Austin (United Microfilms International Dissertation Information Service, Ann Arbor
1989)
Gottlieb, Henrik (2002), "Titles on Subtitling 1929-1999", in Caimi, Annamaria (ed.) (2002),
Cinema: Paradiso delle lingue. I sottotitoli nell'apprendimento linguistico, (Rassegna
Italiana di Linguistica Applicata, Anno XXXIV, 1/2-2002), Bulzoni Editore, Roma, 436
p.
Ivarsson, Jan. (1992). Subtitling for the Media. A Handbook of an Art. Stockholm, TransEdit,
199 p.
Ivarsson, Jan & Carroll, Mary. (1998). Subtitling. Simrishamn, TransEdit, 185 p.
Kagansky, Nina. (1995). TITRA FILM. Une chronique cinématographique et familiale. Paris.
Machado, José. (1993). La traduction au cinéma et le processus de sous-titrage de films. PhD
thesis, Univ. de Paris III.
Testa, Bart (2002), "Screen Words: Early Film and Avant-Garde Film in the House of the
Word", at Symposion Das frühe Kino und die Avantgarde, Vienna
Letters patent at the Swedish Patent and Registration Office, Stockholm.
Subtitle (captioning)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Example of a film with subtitles (quotation dash is used for differentiating speakers)

Subtitles are derived from either a transcript or screenplay of the dialog or commentary in
films, television programs, video games, and the like, usually displayed at the bottom of the
screen, but can also be at the top of the screen if there already is text at the bottom of the screen.
They can either be a form of written translation of a dialog in a foreign language, or a written
rendering of the dialog in the same language, with or without added information to help
viewers who are deaf and hard of hearing to follow the dialog, or people who cannot understand
the spoken dialogue or who have accent recognition problems. The encoded method can either
be pre-rendered with the video or separate as either a graphic or text to be rendered and overlaid
by the receiver. The separate subtitles are used for DVD, Blu-ray and television teletext/Digital
Video Broadcasting (DVB) subtitling or EIA-608 captioning, which are hidden unless
requested by the viewer from a menu or remote controller key or by selecting the relevant page
or service (e.g., p. 888 or CC1), always carry additional sound representations for deaf and
hard of hearing viewers. Teletext subtitle language follows the original audio, except in multi-
lingual countries where the broadcaster may provide subtitles in additional languages on other
teletext pages. EIA-608 captions are similar, except North American Spanish stations may
provide captioning in Spanish on CC3. DVD and Blu-ray only differ in using run-length
encoded graphics instead of text, as well as some HD DVB broadcasts.

Sometimes, mainly at film festivals, subtitles may be shown on a separate display below the
screen, thus saving the film-maker from creating a subtitled copy for perhaps just one showing.
Television subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing is also referred to as closed captioning in
some countries. More exceptional uses also include operas, such as Verdi's Aida, where sung
lyrics in Italian are subtitled in English or in another local language outside the stage area on
luminous screens for the audience to follow the storyline, or on a screen attached to the back
of the chairs in front of the audience.

The word "subtitle" is the prefix "sub-" (below) followed by "title". In some cases, such as live
opera, the dialog is displayed above the stage in what are referred to as "surtitles" ("sur-" for
"above").

Creation, delivery and display of subtitles

Today professional subtitlers usually work with specialized computer software and hardware
where the video is digitally stored on a hard disk, making each individual frame instantly
accessible. Besides creating the subtitles, the subtitler usually also tells the computer software
the exact positions where each subtitle should appear and disappear. For cinema film, this task
is traditionally done by separate technicians. The end result is a subtitle file containing the
actual subtitles as well as position markers indicating where each subtitle should appear and
disappear. These markers are usually based on timecode if it is a work for electronic media
(e.g., TV, video, DVD), or on film length (measured in feet and frames) if the subtitles are to
be used for traditional cinema film.

The finished subtitle file is used to add the subtitles to the picture, either:

 directly into the picture (open subtitles);

 embedded in the vertical interval and later superimposed on the picture by the end user
with the help of an external decoder or a decoder built into the TV (closed subtitles on
TV or video);
 or converted (rendered) to tiff or bmp graphics that are later superimposed on the picture
by the end user's equipment (closed subtitles on DVD or as part of a DVB broadcast).

Subtitles can also be created by individuals using freely available subtitle-creation software
like Subtitle Workshop for Windows, MovieCaptioner for the Mac and Subtitle Composer for
Linux, and then hardcode them onto a video file with programs such as VirtualDub in
combination with VSFilter which could also be used to show subtitles as softsubs in many
software video players.

For multimedia-style Webcasting, check:

 SMIL Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language;

 Timed Text DFXP.

Same-language captions

Same-language captions, i.e., without translation, were primarily intended as an aid for people
who are deaf or hard of hearing. Internationally, there are several major studies which
demonstrate that same-language captioning can have a major impact on literacy and reading
growth across a broad range of reading abilities. This method of subtitling is used by national
television broadcasters in China and in India such as Doordarshan. This idea was struck upon
by Brij Kothari, who believed that SLS makes reading practice an incidental, automatic, and
subconscious part of popular TV entertainment, at a low per-person cost to shore up literacy
rates in India.

Same-Language Subtitling

Same Language Subtitling (SLS) is the use of Synchronized Captioning of Musical Lyrics (or
any text with an Audio/Video/ source) as a Repeated Reading activity. The basic reading
activity involves students viewing a short subtitled presentation projected onscreen, while
completing a response worksheet. To be really effective, the subtitling should have high quality
synchronization of audio and text, and better yet, subtitling should change color in syllabic
synchronization to audio model, and the text should be at a level to challenge students'
language abilities.
Closed captions

The "CC in a TV" symbol Jack Foley created, while senior graphic designer at Boston public
broadcaster WGBH that invented captioning for television, is public domain so that anyone
who captions TV programs can use it.

Closed captioning is the American term for closed subtitles specifically intended for people
who are deaf and hard of hearing. These are a transcription rather than a translation, and usually
contain descriptions of important non-dialog audio as well such as "(sighs)" or "(door creaks)"
and lyrics. From the expression "closed captions" the word "caption" has in recent years come
to mean a subtitle intended for the hard of hearing, be it "open" or "closed". In British English
"subtitles" usually refers to subtitles for the hard of hearing (HoH); however, the term "HoH
subtitles" is sometimes used when there is a need to make a distinction between the two.

Real time

Programs such as news bulletins, current affairs programs, sport, some talk shows and political
and special events utilize real time or online captioning. Live captioning is increasingly
common, especially in the United Kingdom and the United States, as a result of regulations
that stipulate that virtually all TV eventually must be accessible for people who are deaf and
hard–of–hearing.

Pre-prepared

Some programs may be prepared in their entirety several hours before broadcast, but with
insufficient time to prepare a timecoded caption file for automatic play-out. Pre-prepared
captions look very similar to offline captions, although the accuracy of cueing may be
compromised slightly as the captions are not locked to program timecode.

Newsroom captioning involves the automatic transfer of text from the newsroom computer
system to a device which outputs it as captions. It does work, but its suitability as an exclusive
system would only apply to programs which had been scripted in their entirety on the
newsroom computer system, such as short interstitial updates.

In the United States and Canada, some broadcasters have used it exclusively and simply left
uncaptioned sections of the bulletin for which a script was unavailable. Newsroom captioning
limits captions to pre-scripted materials and, therefore, does not cover 100% of the news,
weather and sports segments of a typical local news broadcast which are typically not pre-
scripted, last-second breaking news or changes to the scripts, ad lib conversations of the
broadcasters, emergency or other live remote broadcasts by reporters in-the-field. By failing
to cover items such as these, newsroom style captioning (or use of the Teleprompter for
captioning) typically results in coverage of less than 30% of a local news broadcast.
Live

Communication Access Real-Time Translation (CART) stenographers, who use a computer

with using either stenotype or Velotype keyboards to transcribe stenographic input for
presentation as captions within 2–3 seconds of the representing audio, must caption anything
which is purely live and unscripted; however, the most recent developments include operators
using speech recognition software and revoicing the dialog. Speech recognition technology has
advanced so quickly in the United Kingdom that about 50% of all live captioning is through
speech recognition as of 2005. Real-time captions look different from offline captions, as they
are presented as a continuous flow of text as people speak.

Real-time stenographers are the most highly skilled in their profession. Stenography is a
system of rendering words phonetically, and English, with its multitude of homophones (e.g.,
there, their, they’re), is particularly unsuited to easy transcriptions. Stenographers working in
courts and inquiries usually have 24 hours in which to deliver their transcripts. Consequently
they may enter the same phonetic stenographic codes for a variety of homophones, and fix up
the spelling later. Real-time stenographers must deliver their transcriptions accurately and
immediately. They must therefore develop techniques for keying homophones differently, and
be unswayed by the pressures of delivering accurate product on immediate demand.

Submissions to recent captioning-related inquiries have revealed concerns from broadcasters

about captioning sports. Captioning sports may also affect many different people because of
the weather outside of it. In much sport captioning's absence, the Australian Caption Centre
submitted to the National Working Party on Captioning (NWPC), in November 1998, three
examples of sport captioning, each performed on tennis, rugby league and swimming
programs:

1. Heavily reduced: Captioners ignore commentary and provide only scores and essential
information such as “try” or “out”.
2. Significantly reduced: Captioners use QWERTY input to type summary captions
yielding the essence of what the commentators are saying, delayed due to the limitations
of QWERTY input.
3. Comprehensive realtime: Captioners use stenography to caption the commentary in its
entirety.

The NWPC concluded that the standard they accept is the comprehensive real-time method,
which gives them access to the commentary in its entirety. Also, not all sports are live. Many
events are pre-recorded hours before they are broadcast, allowing them a captioner to caption
them using offline methods.

Hybrid

Because different programs are produced under different conditions, a case-by-case basis must
consequently determine captioning methodology. Some bulletins may have a high incidence
of truly live material, or insufficient access to video feeds and scripts may be provided to the
captioning facility, making stenography unavoidable. Other bulletins may be pre-recorded just
before going to air, making pre-prepared text preferable.