Asklemmy

43958 readers

1316 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

139

Why do some TV broadcasts show a person translating it to sign language instead of using subtitles? (lemm.ee)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

82 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I assume there must be a reason why sign language is superior but I genuinely don't know why.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 23 points 10 months ago (2 children)

A lot of these comments are American so I thought I would provide a different point of view. In the UK it is a legal requirement for some broadcasters to have a certain percentage of signed programmes.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

To add to this, repeats with added sign language were (are?) often broadcast late at night because you were meant to set your video to record them to use as teaching materials. wasn't just sign language, a lot of the videos shown in school was stuff that had been taped from 3am

[–] cosmicrookie 3 points 10 months ago (2 children)

But why is there such a legal requirement?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

To add another part of it, for people using BSL, it's akin to their mother tongue.
Being able to watch content with signing is akin to having a TV show dubbed into your native language, rather than relying on subtitles.

Edit: I just had a check, and it's actually mentioned in the ofcom guidelines:
Subtitle users reflect the full range of proficiency in English; some profoundly deaf people regard BSL as their first language, and are less fluent in English.

[–] Mr_Blott 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The UK's always been pretty inclusive and this law's been around for decades, since way before subtitles were practical, or even visible on crappy old b&w CRT screens

[–] cosmicrookie -2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

So it's just because they haven't bothered updating some guideline booklet about new technologies?

Nobody has gone like: BTW this new thing called subtitles, could actually replace sign language requirements especially now that we have color TVs

That said, I can imagine sign language to be better at real time interpretation, than someone typing in the speach unless they use some really good transcription software

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

I'll just reply on this one too, we have fairly detailed recomendations and guidelines on access services in the UK. If you're curious, it's summarised really well in this document (10 pages).

Live subtitles always used to be done using a stenograph, or similar, though having a look now speech-to-text seems more common. As I happened upon it too, here is a cool white paper by BBC R&D on inserting a longer delay in live events to allow the subtitles to follow more closely.