According to tv tropes, an either/or title: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EitherOrTitle
this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2024
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Thank god for TV Tropes. The "subtitle" meaning "closed captions" or "sub-name" thing still bugs me. Am I the only one bugged by one name being used for multiple things confusingly? Like how "chips" is often used to mean either potato crisps (packet chips) or potato fries (hot chips). Why not just use different names, you know?
I get what you’re saying, IMO “subtitle” should be what is being referred to in the post, a sort of secondary title, whereas the text on screen for translations shouldn’t also be called subtitles, just “captions” is fine, yet they’re commonly called subtitles, who the hell came up with that?
Being an American though, we just call them chips or fries. We may not have much else going for us here, but at the very least we have unambiguous names for our potato snacks.
It has to do with analog TV & tape-based media distribution.
Captions follow a very specific standard & are required to be included on certain broadcast media.
To ensure captioning remains consistent across consumer devices, captions come in specific file formats, typically generated by a third party.
The files are delivered alongside media deliveries & contain timecode markers to sync the text up with the dialogue.
Before digital delivery of media for broadcast, each piece of media arrived on a tape. Each tape had the caption file embedded as lines of video, TVs could scan those lines as they came across in the broadcast signal, & display the captions.
On certain old televisions, you could see the captioning during the broadcast, it would appear as broken black/white dashes across the top of the image.
Any text included in a caption file is considered captioning. Any text outside of that file that appeared over video (including titles, alternate language translations, logos, etc), is considered a subtitle.
They used to be transmitted over a hidden portion of the screen, during the NTSC and PAL era. That was topologically on the signal stream area corresponding to right under the video frame. Thus they were titles (text) that were under (sub) the image. They were also unavailable (closed) to the user until they activated them, when the decoder started drawing them over the frame by folding the signal so the text could appear. They originally were invented for and proposed to aid hearing impaired people by capturing the sound events, including speech, with short descriptive texts (captioning) .
That's why in the US Closed Captioning is for hard hearing, and subtitling usually means only dialogue and other languages. While the rest of the world only uses variations of the word subtitling because English rapes and coopts everything it colonizes.
Cuz the world is messy and language is messier. Not everything fits into neat OCD boxes
Don’t go into STEM, then.
It’s everywhere.
And the definitions in stem fields are often very subtly different, and also different from lay language definitions (like theory in science means something very different than common use)
It's called an "alternate title." It's different from a subtitle, which is a separate object. The alternate title is part of the normal title.
You asked what it was called but you were already calling it what it was called.
Reminds me of the novelisation of Day of the Tentacle that had the title "My Physics Adventure or It's Never Too Late to Stop Pollution, So Let's Start Yesterday".
My favorite of these were the old Rocky And Bullwinkle cartoon
It makes it impossible to search about because most people understand subtitle to mean closed captions, I think.
I mean search engines just suck nowadays irregardless.
But feel free to found the "Society to Eliminate Homonyms or A Group of Like-minded Persons Seeking Clarity in the Meaning of Words and Greater Access to the English Language For All Peoples". Just be careful with the autocorrect in the short title.
Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn is the true title. Those who didn't get this title didn't get the movie either.
I think they're just called subtitles, but I'd be happy for someone to prove me wrong because they deserve a more interesting term.
And just because no one else has said it I'll ad one of my favorite book titles: "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus." Shelley showed off some of her writing chops right there on the cover. And its one of the only times I can use a semicolon and know that I'm doing so correctly.