The Future of Subtitling
There are over 6,000 languages spoken in the world. Sharing stories about things that make us laugh, love, cry, feel show us how we are all not as different as we think. “Without translation, we would be living in provinces bordering on silence.” George Steiner, writer.
In an ever more globalized world, the future of subtitling looks bright. The number of subtitled programs has grown year on year. Subtitles were first developed 35 years ago and we have come a long way since then. More and more, content providers are making their content accessible, from Broadcast to Enterprise, Education to Government.
New advances in technology have made possible to rise and consolidation of subtitling. While voice recognition has aided in speeding up the subtitling process, the technology is not quite there yet and needs further advances.
Live Broadcast subtitling has always been an exhausting task. But since 2000, it has become less expensive and technically complex with the introduction of voice recognition technology.
Since this addition to the market, the number of live broadcasts that are subtitled has mushroomed.
VOD services are becoming increasingly common. VOD content is accessible on more than 1,000 different devices, and getting subtitles to appear accurately across all platforms can be a logistical ordeal.
More and more, we are seeing subtitles appearing on video sharing websites such as YouTube, using machine-generated captions. The next logical advancement is live content streamed online with captions and/or subtitles. If this is the next step, the industry will need legal regulations for live steamed content, in the same way it is regulated on broadcast.
