Subtitling the Cadiz Carnival

We’ve just faced the gargantuan challenge of subtitling 200 hours of BBC Two Winter Olympics coverage across 98 events, featuring 2,871 athletes going for gold, while never being entirely sure what was being shown next. Fog on the slopes, an unexpected Team GB medal in slopestyle – Winter Olympic event running orders and their related TV schedules can change at the drop of a baton. And there’ll be more of the same for the Winter Paralympics on Channel 4, with the added detail of multiple categories in each event – at the London Paralympics, there were around 70 disability categories for athletics and swimming alone.

A decade’s experience covering previous Games, plus recent investment in bespoke subtitling software, means we are well placed to cope with the vagaries and challenges of live subtitling in general and sports subtitling in particular.

Why is it such a challenge? Well, read on.
Each subtitler’s personal voice recognition software can only recognise words it’s been taught, so recordings and spellings for all those names must be added to the software’s dictionary. There are also frequent mentions of coaches, partners, experts, missing or injured competitors and former champions. Imagine you’re subtitling the speed skating and the commentator unexpectedly refers to British 100-metre sprinter Adam Gemili. If this name isn’t in the dictionary, your respoken subtitles might namecheck the hitherto-unknown Adam Jimmy Lee. Similarly, East Asian competitors can be referred to by given name-family name or family name-given name, so if you’ve trained the software to recognise the phrase Li Na rather than Na Li but the commentator plumps for the latter, you’d need to re-word appropriately or risk ending up with a subtitle misrecognition which looks a bit…well…gnarly.

The software also needs to be trained to contextually distinguish the English language’s raft of homophones, as well as learning the subtle differences in each individual user’s enunciation of many thousands of sound-alike words. This ensures the luge commentator’s excited chattering appears on screen as G-force – not GeForce, the volleyball expert is portrayed as opining that the American team need a couple of big serves – not big Serbs, and the eternal optimist from the Caribbean really is predicting the Jamaican bobsleigh team are heading for a comfortable silver – not a comfortable sofa.

Our latest subtitling software enables subtitlers to set up temporary spoken commands, on the fly, that can produce any typed text of the subtitler’s choice. This is a godsend in situations such asGemili/Jimmy Lee above. Subtitlers must also learn the terminology and jargon of each sport – quite simply, you have to know your hairpin from your hog line – to ensure they’re able to produce accurate subtitles that faithfully convey the content and meaning of the soundtrack.

We achieve this by using video training clips archived from previous years’ coverage, listening to and respeaking the soundtrack, editing judiciously so the subtitles are a complement to the on-screen action, rather than being a verbatim on-screen distraction.

We’ve mastered the ability to respeak quickly, with perfect enunciation and consistent tone and emphasis to maximise the accuracy of the voice recognition-produced subtitle text. All the while, we’re continuously listening and mentally editing – i.e. inserting punctuation and removing, like, y’know, all the vocal tics, plus using a keypad to allocate different colours for each speaker and clear/move subtitles so as not to obscure important graphics. Oh, and also monitoring both PC screen (for software performance) and TV screen (for recognition errors that require retrospective correction). It’s a constant cycle of data processing and creation within the human brain, for which linguistic skills and attention to detail are essential. The concentration involved itself borders on the Olympian, and if multitasking was its own Olympic sport, it’d be gold microphones all round for our intrepid team of Sochi subtitlers.

Lee Worth, Production Manager, and Sally Nevrkla, Subtitler, Access Services.