We Red Bee bloggers have written loads about live subtitling and audio description.

But we’ve rather neglected the art of pre-recorded subtitling (and yes, to us it definitely is an art form), so it’s time to redress the balance.

Pre-recorded subtitles have to be faithful to the soundtrack but they also have to be enjoyable for the audience. It’s often not possible to reproduce a soundtrack verbatim because humans just can’t read and absorb words as quickly as they can hear and absorb words. Research into average reading speeds has led to recommended characters-per-minute limits for subtitles. This means that subtitles often have to be edited down to keep them readable, but there can be disagreement amongst viewers about how many words is too many words. Many viewers want access to every utterance, whereas my grandmother is among those who reckon we should edit heavily because it can be hard to keep up. The key to this dilemma is intelligent editing. The trick is identifying key info during fast dialogue while retaining as much of the flavour of the programme as possible.

Flavour is another factor to take into consideration. A character’s accent could be a crucial piece of information in a drama, for instance the Irish characters in Peaky Blinders. But labelling everything they say with IN AN IRISH ACCENT would be pretty irritating – not to mention potentially offensive. Similarly, zere are some accents zat lend zemselves quite well to being written phonetically, and in a comedy like ‘Allo ‘Allo that technique can be very effective, but I don’t think Raymond Blanc would be too pleased if we subtitled him like that! Again, intelligent decision-making based on what information needs to be conveyed and the nature of the programme is crucial.

As a breed, subtitlers are pretty…anally-retentive when it comes to punctuation(!) But we just LOVE letting our creativity r-i-i-i-p when using punctuation and spellings to reflect speech patterns. Who doesn’t?! You’ve probably spotted that this has the potential to be pretty irritating or even offensive too, so it’s another tool that has to be used intelligently.

Can you think of some of the other challenges facing pre-recorded subtitling? And how long do you think it takes us to subtitle 60 minutes of the Hollyoaks omnibus? See my next blog for more on our niche art form!

Rachel Thorn, Subtitler.