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Television Entertainment

Why Everyone Is Watching TV With Closed Captioning On These Days (kottke.org) 440

Jason Kottke: A few months ago I noticed that several friends (who speak English and aren't deaf) routinely watch TV and movies with closed captions and subtitles on. I asked about this on Twitter and the resulting thread was fascinating. Turns out many of you watch TV this way for all kinds of different reasons -- to follow complex dialog in foreign or otherwise difficult accents, some folks better retain information while reading, keeping the sound down so as not to wake sleeping children in tight living spaces, and lots of people who aren't deaf find listening difficult for many reasons (some have trouble listening to dialogue when there's any sort of non-ambient noise in the background).
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Why Everyone Is Watching TV With Closed Captioning On These Days

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  • by dehachel12 ( 4766411 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @01:33AM (#58514418)
    Nearly everything was subtitled when I was young, mostly because most stuff was not in my native tongue (dutch). That's probably why most of the people in my country speak English without many problems.
    • Times are changing (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It's because people often watch TV or YouTube while multitasking. They can just read the words while listening to music/their boss, or they are watching on a subway/at restaurant without headphones. This is no longer the age of the whole families gathers in from of the TV for a wholesome good evening.

      • by flargleblarg ( 685368 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @02:55PM (#58518016)

        ... while listening to music/their boss ...

        What? Like they're in a meeting, and they're watching GoT on their laptop while their boss is talking?

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I'm Flemish and I often hear my fellow countrymen say the same thing, and berate the Walloons and French for not speaking English as well as us.

      But the truth is, Dutch (and its Flemish version even more than the Netherlands variant) is much closer to English than any other language. It's so easy for us to learn English simply because we already speak a language that has the same sounds and many similarities. Subtitles help, but not as much as many people think, otherwise everyone in Flanders would also spea

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • by dow ( 7718 )

        I noticed this when driving through the Netherlands, that I had been listening to a Dutch radio station for quite some time and hadn't realised they were not talking English. The language has the same pace, the same peaks and troughs and they laughed and intoned things in just the same way. It sounds more like UK English than most American English in those ways.

    • by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @02:03AM (#58514528) Journal
      I read a study several years back that confirmed what you just said:

      countries where the movies are subtitled tend to have better foreign-language skills than countries where the movies are dubbed. Sorry, I can't find a reference to the study. :(
    • Nearly everything was subtitled when I was young, mostly because most stuff was not in my native tongue (dutch). That's probably why most of the people in my country speak English without many problems.

      The real reason is that people in the Netherlands know English is: 1. Because it is similar to Dutch and you can deduce the meaning of may words and 2. you've put in the time to study it in school, have homework, read books etc.

      Watching TV with subtitles alone does *not* help with language learning. Try watching Chinese TV with subtitles for 10 years and see how much you can learn just by watching without school where this is part of your education.

      • Of course it's not the subtitles. It's watching TV in english that practices your english! The subtitles are there for people who don't have a basic grip of english and the reason why they get away with having most of their TV program in english.

      • by flux ( 5274 )

        I bet watching Chinese TV with subtitles for 10 years would certainly help, in particular if it were interleaved with actual studies.

        I mean, I don't think many pick up English straight from TV without education. But once you get a bit of education, it sort of creates a feedback loop where you are able to build up your understanding by listening people speak the language and then understanding more and more of it.

    • by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

      That's the same thing in Sweden - subtitles and with the shows in original language except for small kids shows. Been that way since at least the 70's.

      Voiceover on shows is just weird.

    • by tsa ( 15680 )

      Subtitling s so much better for your general development than synchronizing. It helps you not only learn a particular language well, but also lets you understand similarities between languages and the ways people say things differently in different languages. There are many sayings that are similar all over Europe but the differences are interesting and make you learn things about the different countries, for instance. So: yay for subtitling, nay for synchronizing!

    • by Evtim ( 1022085 )

      I would not have been able to follow e.g. Trainspotting without subtitles. My English is quite good but not that much as to discern heavy accents. Another one is that sometimes the movie creators screw up the sound of the speech in one way or another so even the native speakers have trouble. Example: have the effects so loud that if you lower the volume to normal level for them you can't hear the voices....

      In my experience the subtitling by default is the norm for most small countries, like mine and yours.

  • And I fully expect to stop watching stuff completely when I go blind.

  • by Zaelath ( 2588189 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @01:46AM (#58514452)

    So much stuff is mixed for 5.1 like you're going to watch it in a sound proofed theatre with the volume set so that the action sequences will have explosions that literally thud into your chest. But you're not, you're at home, in an apartment, and/or with other people in the house that don't want to listen to the score of the movie at ear-bleeding volume from the rear speaker that is 2 feet away and then strain to hear anyone talking from the centre speaker that is 15 feet away.

    You /could/ try and balance the sound for where all of 1 person can sit, but realistically people don't and it's balanced for a theoretical seat in the middle of the room where no one is sitting.

    Even if you did balance it, that /still/ assumes that you want really loud things to be really loud, and you really want the music to wake you up if you've drifted off to sleep, or otherwise a real theatre (tm) experience.

    The net effect is you spend all night adjusting the volume up and down and rewinding the bit you didn't hear, or you turn on closed captions and read what's inaudible.

    • by JaredOfEuropa ( 526365 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @01:59AM (#58514504) Journal
      You can boost the center speaker separately on most 5.1 amps. And get a center speaker that was designed as one. Doesn’t have to be an expensive one, just one that is tailored to its role; I found that it makes a difference in being able to understand the dialogue at all times without having to adjust the volume all the time. Especially if you dial back the bass a little and/or get rid of the subwoofer.
    • by MemoryDragon ( 544441 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @02:01AM (#58514514)

      Yeah I noticed this too when I moved to 5.1. The 2 channel mix usually is fine volume wise, but as soon as you move higher, literally most AAA movies try just to push the theatre sound. on you. This is unacceptable in normal living conditions where you have neighbours and kids and you end up either using a dynamic volume adjustment (which often results in a semi acceptable soundmix but often also makes small parts really bad audiowise) and or simply readjust the volume yourself.
      The mix usually is that dialogs are normal and explosions and noises should be that your glasses literally shake. If you turn down the volume you get acceptable explosion noise but the dialogs are really bad to understand especially in non perfect sound setups which is more the norm than the exception. In the end it is just easier to live with it and add subtitles to the mix.

    • by Darinbob ( 1142669 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @02:30AM (#58514640)

      That's one of the reasons. I don't use a stereo system for the TV. Many movies have a dynamic range that don't work well, you get either very quiet which is hard to hear and then a moment later something will be really loud. Can't turn the volume up because the neighbors will likely be annoyed (as am I when they do the same). I don't have troubles in theaters following what's going on but I do find it harder at home.

      Plus the various accents that can be hard, and I also find myself rewinding over and over sometimes to just understand what the words were. Once I got a TV with closed captioning on I turned it on and kept it on. It's not an annoyance so I wonder why people are even worrying about it.

    • by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @02:31AM (#58514642) Journal

      So much stuff is mixed for 5.1

      That and the fashion for people mumbling over high background noise.

      I did think I was getting hearing problems a while back becaue I had so mih trouble hearing dialog. Then Iwatched an old film and it was crystal clear.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by aix tom ( 902140 )

        Exactly this. I also can understand old movies perfectly well, but newer movies are getting harder and harder to follow without subtitles.

      • Tour of Duty and Casuholby are big culprits. I too thought it was my lugs till I was tidying up my HDs and if it was black and white I could hear it fine.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • by Baleet ( 4705757 )
        Exactly. In the old days, actors enunciated clearly so that people could understand the dialog. Nowadays, the emphasis seems to be on indulging the actor's "realistic" performance, whether the audience gets anything out of it or not.
        • In fact, old US movie roles were spoken in a special "transatlantic style" that was designed to be easy to hear given the sound tech of the day, with the disadvantage of not corresponding to the way real Americans spoke at the time.

    • Don't you have audio dynamic range compression available on your equipment? This was a specific design decision made a long time ago, stuff should be mixed and recorded for the perfect theater experience and it's up to the equipment in the end to control volume and importantly volume ranges.

      My bluray player and my TV independently allow me to set audio dynamic range compression which fixes precisely the problem you describe.

      • by Mouldy ( 1322581 )
        My AVR has a simple toggle option for 'midnight mode' which is essentially what you describe; making loud things quieter so you can hear the quiet stuff without the risk of a surprise explosion waking up everyone in your house.

        Unfortunately it's not nearly configurable enough to provide a useful level of compression & I still have to jack the volume up to hear mumbling or relatively-quiet dialog. I've since turned my centre front speak up (a LOT) and it's made it much better.

        I initially assumed it
    • It's not just that. You also get dickheads like Christopher Nolan specifically making the dialogue difficult to hear, as he did in Interstellar. For some reason he assumed that the audience knows the script as well as he does, and that they know that the mumbled dialog isn't important to the plot. In reality, people don't know whether they missed something important and find it frustrating. After "rewinding" the movie about 10 times, I finally turned subtitles on and was able to enjoy the movie.

      I've seen pe

    • I find this even worse when I'm watching Netflix on my PC. Many TV shows are fine, but most movies (DVDs are even worse?) I'm constantly shifting the volume between dialog I can't hear and special effects you can hear through the whole house it seems like.

    • by GoRK ( 10018 )

      Yeah; you are absolutely right. The modern multichannel audio tracks like DTS-HD or Dolby Atmos are all super if you have the gear to reproduce them, but the simple fact is that many people will watch the film with their regular TV's stereo speakers where ideally you want a nice stereo mix with a little compression and good ducking on the vocals.

      Many movies do include one for this very reason. You can very often go to the audio setup and pick the 2.0 or 2.1 mix, and you will get better results than letting

    • by darronb ( 217897 )

      I always hated the dialog going to the center speaker. It's rarely even a third as good as the two front side speakers, and tinny voices from a specific location really screws with the immersion for me.

      Half the time I disconnected the center speaker and forced it to split dialog across the two front speakers. Sometimes I was able to force dialog across the front speakers in addition to the center... I don't recall exactly what I was doing there. I think it was some surround sound processing mode.

      I couldn

  • How!? (Score:5, Funny)

    by darkain ( 749283 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @01:53AM (#58514476) Homepage

    Nah, it just got accidentally turned on, and nobody knows how to disable it!

  • by iliketrash ( 624051 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @01:55AM (#58514484)

    There is a simple but vexing explanation for most people watching with captioning: Dialog audio is mixed nowadays in such a way to make it have a certain sound character, not for intelligibility. Why this happens is the vexing part. Mainly it is a bass boost. People blame the actors for mumbling. Maybe but I doubt it. You do realize, don't you, that most dialog is added after the scene is shot, requiring the actors to watch themselves on a video screen and repeat the lines in a recording studio. Look up "ADR" or "looping." For real. There is simply no excuse for unintelligible dialog but the art of the day apparently requires characters to have dramatic deep, impressive voices. You might also wonder why TV procedurals have office scenes that are so poorly lit; it's for dramatic effect. Nobody has office spaces lit like that. On the death of Jerry Lewis a couple years ago I watched The King of Comedy, from 1980, in a theater. Mono sound. Not even stereo music. Perfectly intelligible. Amazing. Also, another problem is that music and sound effects are frequently mixed too high; this is a problem for people with poor cocktail party ability. The situation is so bad for TV that at least one company is selling a special speaker with signal processing to try to fix the situation. Somebody should be shot for this state of affairs.

    • by TWX ( 665546 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @02:11AM (#58514562)

      ADR isn't as common as you imply, especially for weekly television shows. There's simply not time to re-dub all of the audio when production staff have to figure out which takes they're going to use and how to get the content down into a 22 minute or 46 minute timeslot, plus integrate any special or video effects.

    • by Rockoon ( 1252108 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @02:24AM (#58514620)

      You do realize, don't you, that most dialog is added after the scene is shot, requiring the actors to watch themselves on a video screen and repeat the lines in a recording studio.

      No thats not "mostly" how its done. The sound engineers use mic's that only pick up the actors voices. They want the actors voices and only the actors voices recorded with the film. It is all the other sound thats added in in post. Everything.

      For instance, the clank of silverware hitting a dinner plate? added in. Had to be. Wasn't recorded during filming. Footsteps? Added in. Had to be. Wasn't recorded during filming. The sound of a person ripping a piece of paper? Added in. Had to be.

      If your actors have to go into sound studios and pretend to be voice-over specialists for your not-animated movie, then something went seriously wrong.

    • Audio mixing isn't bad, it's simply done for a theater experience. The design decision was made early on that it is up to the end user equipment to present something that is intelligible in a living room. For that most equipment offers dynamic range compression which in the 5.1 world often includes turning down the .1 and boosting the centre channel too.

    • by jools33 ( 252092 )

      100% agree - if I set the volume so that I can hear the quietest dialog, then after about 10 minutes there will be some really loud sound effects that will be defeaning to my neighbours a floor above me. Its like they think we are watching the series in a concert arena or something. So the result is that I set the volume so this does not happen, and then close captioning is the only way to work out what is said in the mostly quiet dialogs.

      • I do the same thing. I can choose to set the sound effects and "background" music to a decent volume and not hear the dialogue. Or I can choose to hear the dialogue and wake everyone up in my house with the booming sound effects and "background" music. I choose the former and use closed captioning to get the dialog that I missed. I'd prefer to have normal dialogue volume and normal sound effects/background music, but that doesn't seem to be an option.

  • by gaiageek ( 1070870 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @01:56AM (#58514488)
    Even if you're a native speaker of the language spoken in the movie (or show) you're watching, there's often something said during it that you understand by context even though you didn't quite understand exactly what was spoken. Putting the subtitles on gives you that exact clarity of the dialogue. In re-watching favorite movies (that I've already seen 10 times or more) but with subtitles turned on, I've enjoyed the "Oh that's what they're saying!" revelation, which maybe helped me understand something of the story or character that much more - plus it's always fun to discover that something new in a story which is so familiar to you.
    • That happens to me a lot. I think of it like listening to music; I may have heard the same song a hundred times but I'm still confused by the words.

  • by Zarhan ( 415465 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @02:01AM (#58514512)

    Way back when, in late 80's and 90's, I played lots of adventure games by Sierra and Lucasarts. The dialog was never voiced until the CD-ROM era. As such, reading the dialog was like reading a book ("Look behind you! A Three-headed monkey!"). My eyes could process the information at the speed of a thought and the plot advanced.

    Then the CD-ROM era hit and suddenly we had a bunch of voiced dialogue, from Z-list actors, and in many cases unskippable. As such, I have a disgust bubbling up whenever there's a game with a long dialogue scene. I play games with subtitles on, and whenever there's a dialogue, I just keep hitting space the moment I've read and processed the line and just ignore whatever the actors are saying.

    This has more or less translated to non-interactive media (movies, tv shows) as well. I really don't care about the actors voices except perhaps in very emotional scenes (e.g. end of Return of the King) or where the actors really ham it up (e.g. BRIAN BLESSED). Especially in action-packed scenes it's nice to just quickly read the dialog and then concentrate on the things going on.

    So, watching stuff with subtitles/captions is not so much because I couldn't make out the dialog, it's for giving me the dialogue much faster so I can ignore the articulation of actors unless there is really a point to it. Sometimes when the captions are for hearing-impaired, it also helps in drawing attention to sounds I might have otherwise ignored, especially if I cannot raise the volume. [LIGHT FOOTSTEPS] or whatever indicates that yes, there is indeed a someone stalking in the background, which I might not even have noticed otherwise, but it's clearly meant to be heard to drive up suspense.

    • I play games with subtitles on, but watch movies without them.
      For games it's simple - there may be noise during the dialog that may make the dialog hard to understand. The same is true for a movie, but I can rewind the movie a few seconds and listen to it again.

    • Much like you describe, I can read the subtitles faster than the line is delivered. But that can sometimes kill the timing of the punchline or the dramatic delivery. It's like when you're watching a show and there's a countdown timer to get you to tune in to the next program...well, it's not funny if you know exactly when the final joke is coming.
  • ...with closed captioning on is the Peter Capaldi era of Doctor Who, when he's interacting with Bill. Their accents are simply too different for my brain to easily handle switching from one to the other when they talk.

  • by mykepredko ( 40154 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @02:22AM (#58514612) Homepage

    I have a daughter with a hearing impairment, so when she's in the room we turn on the Closed Captioning.

    Personally, I much prefer watching without Closed Captioning because I find that I lose the nuance/emotion of what's happening on the screen. Maybe it's the distraction of moving my eyes up and down but I find that I don't get as full an experience.

    YMMV.

  • by ledow ( 319597 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @02:42AM (#58514670) Homepage

    1) If you keep adjusting the fecking volumes so that on ordinary stereo systems the dialogue is drowned out by all the background noise or music, I can't hear what they are damn well saying.
    2) You can have the TV on quieter, and watch it while doing something else, but if you miss a line, you can just look back at the screen.
    3) Personally, people talking through movies - drives me mad. Rather than shout at them, I just blank them out and read the text.
    4) My ex used to use subtitles because she was Italian and sometimes the dialog was too fast and it was easier for her to read the English than decipher the audio along with everything else. In Italy, this is quite common - there are lots of channels that have both English and Italian subtitles, you just press a different button.

  • by havana9 ( 101033 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @02:43AM (#58514672)
    What I have noticed is that newer slim TV sets, espaecially smart TV have tiny little speakers facing backwards or downward, giving a tinny sound. TV makers try to equalize the signal, but this makes sometimes a worse result, you have to listen at at high volume, or use external speakers. Older CRT TV sets had bigger loudspeakers and some of them had also a proper reflex vent and a connector [wikipedia.org] to add an external loudspeaker. By the way I think it's an US thing, for Italian serial and TV broadcast almost nobody uses closed captions, except when in a serial or in an newscast someone is talking in vernacular.
  • by idji ( 984038 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @02:45AM (#58514686)
    often the subtitles will tell you character's names especially when two people are talking together. It helps to remember who minor characters are
    They might also have the name of a song that is playing.
    Sometimes the subtitles have what a background character said that was really unintelligable.
    It is super annoying to miss a word and have to go back 10 seconds to re-hear it. No-one says "What did he say? go back!". never happens with subtitles.
    I know with certainty that I will truly have missed NOTHING.
    • Yes to all of that. Especially character names (this is required for Game of Thrones).

      My favorite subtitle is:
      [Indistinct Chattering]

      Live subtitles are both hilarious and annoying at the same time because they are terrible. Watching live traffic subtitles is the most interesting (and worst interpretation of speech ever).

      Watch 20 minutes of Das Boot (best submarine movie ever) with english subtitles but also the english dub. Worst dub ever, it's then an action film converted to comedy...

  • As a subtitle user myself I'd say the experience is different. For one, you miss out on some of the suspense when the dialogue is written whilst the characters are still mid-sentence!
  • I have several reasons why I prefer subtitles, but only in cases where it perfectly matches the dialogue... to the people who think paraphrasing in subtitles is okay, "I hate you." My reasons for loving subtitles are:

    • People who can't shut up during movies causing me to miss names, events, jokes, stories, or any other important piece of dialogue.
    • Poor audio quality due to either poor speakers or poor editing.
    • Off camera dialogue that a typical viewer would normally miss.
    • Fast and quiet jokes that are unimporta
  • A big part of the reason I have subtitles on is the wildly varying volume, especially during movies. And British drama producers seem to think we have decent speakers in our TVs and on our PCs and can comfortably go from a whisper to a shout without leaping for the volume control. And then there's the commercials...

    But there's a special problem when watching on my PC using the WinTV app. When there are in-movie subtitles it doesn't bother duplicating them but just leaves the previous subtitle on-screen, ove

  • by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @04:05AM (#58514924) Homepage

    I think it comes down to two things:

    - People naturally speak fast, and don't always enunciate. The modern trend to realism therefore has the characters speak naturally, means that they speak fast and don't enunciate. Slow them down just a bit, and they could enunciate better.

    - Sound relationships. Again, striving for realism: background sounds may dominate the dialog. Sometimes it's no different than sitting in a noisy restaurant: you can't understand your neighbor for all the other sounds impinging on your ears.

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  • I have this problem with Mr Robot, which I'm currently binge-watching (when not working). Note that I /do/ have a hearing problem and also suffer from the aforementioned 'ambient noise' problem. However, I don't have a problem with most of the dialog...it's only the main character really - they seem to make his voice all 'atmospheric', and when he's talking to his imaginary friend, you don't even have lips to re-enforce the audio (which I think everyone does, so one degree or another).
    It's really quite irri

  • Commercials are louder than normal programs. IT is so jarring when the commercial kicks in. So people muted the sound and are using CC. But wait, pretty soon commercials will BOLD FACE their captions ruining this solution too, pretty soon.
  • I remember watching "King Of The Hill" on TV once with the CC turned on just to see what the unintelligible character Boomhauer was saying. The CC text didn't match the scene, and in it he started rambling about a sex scene involving whips (albeit in a rated-G fashion)!
  • Sometimes there's conversation that is in the subtitles but is either too dim in the background of the scene, or the scene just cuts off before the sentence is finished.

    And that's when the background music isn't overwhelming the mumbling voice to begin with.

  • Mr. Simpson, don't you worry, I watched Matlock in a bar last night. The sound wasn't on, but I caught the gist of it.

  • I may try it. Actors many times "act" their way through dialog and they become incomprehensible. I don't like going, "huh?" "what did he say?" It destroys the scene and movie and just makes it work. Many times the sounds of the scene become more important to the director/producer than the dialog, putting it second or even third to the sound and visuals. It is almost as if they resent any dialog at all getting in the way of their "art." And you can't tell an actor not to mumble like James Dean.
  • I usually kept subtitles on when watching The Wire so I could understand what some of the kids were saying. It is tough for an old white guy and subtitles were much better than continually rewinding and blasting the volume whenever Snoop had a line.
  • by MBGMorden ( 803437 ) on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @08:07AM (#58515730)

    I can see the appeal for some people and I don't really have a problem with it for foreign language films, however for me personally I find that if the text is there, I have a tendency to reflexively read it. That puts my visual focus on the letters rather than the picture.

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