Subtitling and Transcription Services Part 3
What is transcription? And what do subtitling and transcription services have to do with each other? This is part of a series of posts on the myriad uses and types of transcription, brought to you by Tigerfish Transcribing, experts at transcribing audio to text, video to text, transcribing interviews, focus group meetings, medical and legal transcription, and best transcription services for Chicago, New York, Seattle and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Time Takes Space: The Art of Subtitling
In the world of subtitles, time takes up space. That’s what happens when you transcribe audible words to visible ones. The longer it takes to hear a dialogue or soliloquy, the more space it will need on screen. Subtitling and transcription are intertwined; stark choices must be made when editing the transcript that becomes the visible soundtrack.
In general, subtitles are kept to 40 or 45 characters per line, and lines are displayed for one and a half seconds. You could think of subtitles as extreme edited transcripts: reading is so much slower than hearing that often a film’s dialogue is cut by more than a third!
As in editing other kinds of transcripts, the transcriber and the subtitler have to make decisions about overlapping speakers and when it is important to include interjections. The subtitler needs to know the plot of the film in order to decide what to include and what to cut, just as a transcript editor needs to know the subject and purpose of a recording in order to provide the client with exactly the transcript they need.
Jason Avery
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