Comment by creesch

10 days ago

> When I'm reading a transcript

That's the thing though, subtitles aren't intended as full transcripts. They are intended to allow a wide variety of people to follow the content.

A lot of people read slower than they would hear speech. So subtitles often need to condense or rephrase speech to keep pace with the video. The goal is usually to convey meaning clearly within the time available on screen. Not to capture every single word.

If they tried to be fully verbatim, you'd either have subtitles disappearing before most viewers could finish reading them or large blocks of text covering the screen. Subtitlers also have to account for things like overlapping dialogue, filler words, and false starts, which can make exact transcriptions harder to read and more distracting in a visual medium.

I mean, yeah in your own native language I agree it sort of sucks if you can still hear the spoken words as well. But, to be frank, you are also the minority group here as far as subtitle target audiences go.

And to be honest, if they were fully verbatim, I'd wager you quickly would be annoyed as well. Simply because you will notice how much attention they then draw, making you less able to actually view the content.

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creesch

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iczero  10 days ago

I regularly enable YouTube subtitles. Almost always, they are a 100% verbatim transcription, excluding errors from auto-transcription. I am not annoyed in the slightest, and in fact I very much prefer that they are verbatim.

If you are too slow at reading subtitles, you can either slow down the video or train yourself to read faster. Or you can just disable the subtitles.

  • ben_w  9 days ago

    > If you are too slow at reading subtitles, you can either slow down the video or train yourself to read faster. Or you can just disable the subtitles.

    And what are deaf people supposed to do in a cinema, or with broadcast TV?

    (And I'm ignoring other uses, e.g. learning a foreign language; for that, sometimes you want the exact words, sometimes the gist, but it's highly situational; but even once you've learned the language itself, regional accents even without vocabulary changes can be tough).

  • creesch  10 days ago

    > If you are too slow at reading subtitles, you can either slow down the video or train yourself to read faster. Or you can just disable the subtitles.

    That's just plain tone deaf, plain and simple. I was not talking about myself, or just youtube. You are not everyone else, your use case is not everyone else their use case. It really isn't that difficult.