Captioning research calls for international industry standard
Red Bee Media has sponsored the first research paper to review, compare and contrast different regulations for captioning quality around the world. The whitepaper by Media Access Australia calls for more detailed international discussions on captioning to help reach an international standard.
The announcement:
Sydney, Australia – 31 March 2014 – Red Bee Media, one of the world’s leading media services companies, is supporting the industry call for more detailed cross border discussions between regulators to standardise high-quality captioning of live television and online digital video content, as well as other access services.
Welcoming the release of a whitepaper by Media Access Australia, Caption Quality: International Approaches to Standards and Measurement, that details the different international approaches to caption quality standards and measurements, Red Bee Media Australia Managing Director Chris Howe said international standards for benchmarking live-captioning services in particular were an important step, and offers Australia an opportunity to lead the market in terms of developing its captioning standards.
An issue that I find can occur with captioning where it is to localise content such as SBS’s subtitles is the use of “dialect-specific” or “nation-specific” captioning. In some European dramas that I have seen on SBS, I had noticed that the English subtitles were specifically “Australian-localised”. There may be situations where SBS gets the first “bite of the cherry” for a foreign-language program i.e. is the first broadcaster to show the program in an English-language market.
Here, they turn out English subtitles for it as part of preparing it for local screening and you end up with English-language subtitles that are slanted to the Australian English. Another English-language market may have to scour these subtitles to slant them to their dialect/
One key example of this was an episode of Inspector Rex involving a hit-and-run and one of the panel beaters were to move the affected car part elsewhere. The car being used was a Peugeot ute and the English-language subtitles referred to it as a ute as we say in Australia where as most other English-language countries would refer to the same vehicle as a pickup truck or pickup.
A good practice may be to identify caption/subtitle packages with a dialect identifier like EN-GB for British English or EN-AU for Australian English.