Wimbledon started yesterday – but, for the Access Services team, our preparations to tackle the challenges of subtitling every minute of the live TV coverage in real time began weeks ago.

PREPARING FOR ALL EVENTUALITIES
Our Operations team plan the daily shift patterns and subtitling allocations for around 200 subtitlers in our Production team, and for an event such as Wimbledon roughly 20 subtitlers are earmarked at least a month in advance for the entire fortnight of live coverage. This is to ensure their shifts can be planned at appropriate times to suit coverage across the tournament, building in flexibility for the inevitable programme overruns when rain stops play or Andy Murray’s hitherto-unknown third round opponent plays the match of his life and extends our brave champion to a nerve-shredding fifth set decider.

ACCESSING THE ACTION
One challenge of subtitling a sport like tennis live is ensuring that the subtitles complement rather than obscure the on-screen action. Subtitles appear at the bottom of the screen for the tennis matches (as opposed to football, where they are all at the top, due to the nature of the action), then we raise them so as not to obscure Astons during interviews, for example. The delay between respeaking and subtitles appearing on screen means the subtitler tries to anticipate when a player is going to serve and wraps up their subtitles in good time so they can be read and cleared off screen before the ball is played.

CRYSTAL BALL GAZING
If the commentators carry on talking during the rally, the subtitler can pick up the thread again after the point ends, paraphrasing and changing tense as necessary. Any subtitle delay also has implications for deciding whether to include umpire and line judge interjections. Sometimes, a crystal ball would be handy, but it’s the kind of judgement call that comes from our many years’ experience of subtitling Wimbledon. For example, the word “Out!” appearing on screen when the player is already bouncing the ball for the next serve wouldn’t be particularly useful. And a subtitle simply saying “30-15” when the score is already on screen isn’t necessary either. However, indicating a let serve or an umpire overrule is vital to comprehension. And a label such as “CROWD: Come on, Andy!” can greatly enhance the atmosphere engendered for the viewer.

As with all live programming, it’s impossible to know in advance everyone or everything that will be namechecked by the commentators, so when words occur which the voice recognition software hasn’t been trained to recognise, subtitlers have traditionally paraphrased or edited around the vocabulary in question. However, our subtitling software now enables us to use specific spoken commands on-the-fly to produce such vocab on air, once the subtitler has typed in the desired word(s). This functionality is invaluable, but often needs to go hand-in-hand with detailed knowledge of the subject area being covered. After all, if an unseeded Serbian player progresses to the semi-final and during commentary Pat Cash draws comparisons to 6’ 6” Slobodan Zivojinovic’s similar run in Wimbledon ‘86, the subtitler needs to know how to spell his name (and type pretty fast!) in order to replicate it on air while keeping up with the soundtrack.

NOT ONLY… BUT ALSO…
Don’t forget, each individual subtitler needs to train their own version of the voice recognition software – to recognise and reproduce the names of hundreds of players who may be referred to by full name, just first name, just surname or in the case of female players with a Miss/Mrs title (so the software must recognise all these variations), as well as anyone else who might be mentioned in commentary, such as coaches, partners, umpires, past champions and indeed notable spectators.

This expert knowledge is also vital for pre-empting specific homophones and soundalikes within tennis terminology that may confuse the voice recognition software. It’s pretty important to be able to distinguish between your big serves and your big Serbs (like Slobodan above), your deuce and your juice, your baseline and your bassline, and with the ever-rising prize money involved in the game these days, there’s clearly a world of difference between playing for the ATP and playing for80p.

When the final ace has been hit, the final strawberry dipped in cream and the trophies held aloft, we’ll have covered over 150 hours of Wimbledon, just one of the high-profile events we’re subtitling this summer.

Lee Worth, Subtitling Team Leader, Access Services.