When watching any film or video, I automatically click on the subtitle option. Subtitles are written translations of a film’s dialogue or narration superimposed on the screen, thus allowing you to read along and follow the actors as they speak in their native language, be it French, Russian, Farsi, Spanish, whatever.
I have grown to love captions and subtitles (except for auto-generated English captions which are often lousy transcriptions.) It’s not because I have a hearing disorder, it’s because with captions/subs, I can better comprehend the dialogue or the voiced narration.
While initially designed to help deaf people follow the dialogue or narration in a film or video, subtitles or audio transcriptions have many benefits even for people with normal hearing.
Many people actually hate captions or subtitles. They find it irritating or difficult to read titles while watching the images at the same time. Cinema purists would argue that subs clutter the aesthetics of the images.
The actress Helen Mirren was quoted as saying: “The vast American public will not accept films with subtitles.” This was seconded by film critic Alissa Wilkinson when she said: “Americans just don’t like reading subtitles,” explaining why she had doubted that the Academy would give the Oscar award to the Korean film Parasite.
That’s too bad for Americans or any hater of subtitles. As Bong Joon-ho, the director of Parasite quipped during his acceptance speech at the Oscars: “Once you overcome the 1-inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.”
I say amen to that. I have an eclectic taste when it comes to films. I specially love watching foreign films, as long as they are subtitled right. This is why I developed the skill of watching images and reading the subs all at once. It’s a skill probably akin to being ambidextrous, which enables a gifted individual to write simultaneously with left and right hand.
Thanks to my acquired visual dexterity, my appreciation for great cinema has vastly expanded through the years. I now watch a lot of narrative and documentary films from other countries.
Because of subtitled DVD films from Hollywood, I can now better appreciate the dialogue of classic films by American filmmakers, which I have watched before. Much of the dialogue spiels were lost to me then. But with the aid of subtitles I have discovered that some of the words were not as I perceived them.
Subtitles in American films are especially helpful when it comes to films featuring Marlon Brando, Robert de Niro, and Sean Penn. These so-called Method actors sometimes just mumble their lines. And then there’s Sylvester Stallone who slurs his lines unintelligibly.
Have you tried watching American comedy without subtitles? The jokes, the pacing, the tone, the gags, the payoff in most any given American comedy show would go over the head of the average Filipino viewer who has to mentally translate the English words into native Tagalog.
I am also extremely grateful for subs when watching films that have actors who speak English with Australian, Southern American, British cockney, German, Indian and African accents. Without subs and captions, you will find yourself struggling to track the diverse medley of tones and inflections, even minor details about places and names mentioned in the dialogue.
You know who enunciate words clearly and can be understood without the need for subs? British actors who were former Shakespearean actors on stage: Olivier, Burton, O’Toole, Scofield, Plummer, Nicolson, McKellen, Jacobi, Mirren, Dench, Blanchett, Branagh, Nicolson, Cumberbatch and others of their elite class.
Speaking of Shakespeare, thanks to subs, we can now follow his plays’ poetic dialogue in all their iambic glory while watching the videos. May I add that we can now also follow and understand what’s going on in such classic operas as Magic Flute, Aida, Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, because of the English translations of arias and dialogue. But of course this is just me probably being carried away as a trying-hard erudite show-off.
It turns out that reading subs is an effective English vocabulary builder. Lately, I learned words like plinking, scoffs, sniffles and even how to pronounce them right. For example, that’s how I learned the proper way to pronounce “awry.” It’s like being in speech training.
This is why I now require my grandkids to click on the subtitle option whenever they watch anything on DVD or streaming media. We have in fact become a subtitles family. We never like to watch movies without subtitles. Even with Hollywood films, we would rather wait for the official subtitled versions. The same with any content on streaming platforms.
As an aside, it is definitely possible to learn another language by watching TV with subtitles. I can now parlez vous a little bit in French. I am happy that the little Spanish I learned in college has expanded just by watching films from Spain and Argentina.
By the way, when watching a film with good subs, you can turn down the volume and still follow the story. This way, you can watch videos in sound-sensitive environments or in your bedroom when your better half or partner is already fast asleep.
Is there a difference between a subtitle and a caption? To me they are the same but for definition’s sake, subtitling is used as a means of translating a medium into another language so that speakers of other languages can enjoy it. Captioning, on the other hand, is more commonly used as a service to aid deaf and hard of hearing audiences.
By the way, I found out that subtitling is now becoming a cottage industry. My daughter recently told me about wanted ads for captioning and subtitling jobs. What a way to make a living; you get to watch movies while at work!
For those who are still reluctant to embrace subtitles, consider this added benefit. Neurologists say that reading subtitles actually exercises your brain more because your brain is doing two complex things at once: trying to put together what you are reading while at the same time gathering information of what you are seeing in the film or video.
So thank God for subtitles, or sous titres in French, untertitel in German, and sottotitolo in Italian. As windows and bridges to understanding, subtitles deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. Because of the almost infinite range of movies that I am now able to watch, they enable me to mentally travel and transcend cultural and linguistic barriers that used to keep human beings apart.
As for seniors like me, captions and subtitles keep the brain and eyes wonderfully engaged, keeping the inevitability of mental decline at bay.