Comment by Fluorescence
10 days ago
It makes me curious about how human subtitlers or even scriptwriters choose to transcribe intentionally ambiguous speech, puns and narratively important mishearings. It's like you need to subtitle what is heard not what is said.
Do those born profoundly deaf specifically study word sounds in order to understand/create puns, rhymes and such so they don't need assistance understanding narrative mishearings?
It must feel like a form of abstract mathematics without the experiential component... but then I suspect mathematicians manufacture an experiential phenomena with their abstractions with their claims of a beauty like music... hmm!
The quality of subtitles implies that almost no effort is being put into their creation. Watch even a high budget movie/TV show and be aghast at how frequently they diverge.
A good subtitle isn't a perfect copy of what was said.
Hard disagree. When I'm reading a transcript, I want word-for-word what the people said, not a creative edit. I want the speakers' voice, not the transcriptionist's.
And when I'm watching subtitles in my own language (say because I want the volume low so I'm not disturbing others), I hate when the words I see don't match the words I hear. It's the quickest way I can imagine to get sucked out of the content and into awareness of the delivery of the content.
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Aren't same-language subtitles supposed to be perfect literal transcripts, while cross-language subtitling is supposed to be compressed creative interpretations?
Tom Scott would agree with you. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pU9sHwNKc2c
I had similar thoughts when reading Huck Finn. It's not just phonetically spelled, it's much different. Almost like Twain came up with a list of words, and then had a bunch of 2nd graders tell him the spelling of words they had seen. I guess at some point, you just get good at bad spelling?
Writing in the vernacular, I believe it's called. I do something like that if I'm texting.
The book "Feersum Endjinn" by Iain M. Banks uses something like this for one of its characters to quite good effect.
Except it forces me to slow down to "decypher" the text and makes the reading labored. I understand the point as it is part of the character, but it is easier to understand someone speaking in that vernacular vs reading the forced misspellings. I definitely don't want to get to the point of being good at reading it though. I wonder if this is how second grade teachers feel reading the class' schoolwork?
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