The sporting summer has been breathtaking; for our live subtitling team, sometimes literally, as well as figuratively.

Barely a day has passed unmarked by a major tournament or significant competitive milestone. After all the football (so much football), tennis, British Grand Prix and most recently, Rory McIlroy winning the Claret Jug at Hoylake, it seems impossible to pack in anything else.

Nonetheless, there’s still time to dollop one more massive helping of drama onto the sporting smorgasbord. The Commonwealth Games is a bit like the Olympics, but a streamlined, boutique quadrennial sporting and cultural celebration, with lawn bowls instead of equestrianism, and no USA or China but four home teams instead of one.

This year’s host city is Glasgow, and the theme, Brilliant Moments, reflects the organisers’ confidence that you won’t want to miss a thing. The multiplatform age enables the viewer to do just that, with blanket access via the red button, online streaming and smartphone and tablet apps. But BBC One, Two and Three also have 30 hours of programming every day, for the 11 days of the Games, which we at Red Bee will subtitle.

Preparation is the key. For a major event like this, there’s no way to cut corners. The TV coverage could feature any one of the 17 sports or thousands of athletes at any time. Our wordlist compilers have spent several weeks using their high-quality, targeted skills to collate all the essential information. It’s not just the names of the participants and venues. There might be a mountain of non-English descriptors that need conquering. Record holders and past greats are usually mentioned, so you need to add them to your personal vocabulary – “Johnstone Kipkoech” and voice recognition software are not exactly natural bedfellows.

As with most extended specialist programming, we assemble a team of subtitlers to cover all the direct Games output. With potentially so much to prepare, it can be a lengthy process, but it ensures their voice models are in peak condition and ready for all reasonable eventualities. They use the wordlists and practise with relevant vidaeo clips before their first stint on air. A good respeaker isn’t required to be an authority on all sports, so the video clips help to provide a crash course in unfamiliar or rarely-broadcast events. Once you have an idea of how the action proceeds on screen, you can alter the position of the subtitles to minimise the chances of obscuring key moments. It sounds obvious, but in netball, for example, if you leave the subtitles at the top of the screen, which is the default position for most sports, they’ll cover up every shot on goal.

When subtitlers are on air, there are several aids to respeaking, which assist their accuracy. The voice recognition software uses context to help decipher what is being said, but sporting terminology and commentary often don’t follow conventional syntax. In these cases, the subtitler creates voice commands called macros, which transpose a particular combination of sounds into the required word or phrase. Temporary house styles, which often deal with formatting, are uploaded to the transmission software. These ensure “arabesque” should never appear as “Arab desk” in gymnastics, and the Games’ edition is always correctly formatted as “XX”, rather than “20”. It’s easier to understand if the format matches the on-screen graphics, as well as looking neater. Finally, there’s a text box, for typing in a last-minute piece of unexpected but essential vocabulary – so far, we’ve had the #commonwelfie craze, and discovered that the gift presented with the medals is called a quaich. The text box is also a useful back-up, should the software recognition fail for a crucial, but awkward name. Once the next subtitler takes over, the problematic word is added, or retrained.

The knowledge that Red Bee is helping to make the Games accessible to as many viewers as possible is ample reward for all that hard work and preparation. For those in our Glasgow office, there’s the added incentive of providing subtitles for a home town Games and potentially having a Scottish gold won while they’re on air. And in the unlikely event that the whole shebang leaves you unmoved, don’t worry; by the time it’s over, there’s only five days until the football season kicks off again…

Chloe Gallagher, Subtitler.