6 Minute English / The art of subtitling

Note: This is not a word-for-word transcript.

Neil Hello. This is 6 Minute English from BBC Learning English. I m Neil.

And I m Beth.

If you re deaf or hard of hearing, watching television would be impossible without subtitles - the words of dialogue added at the bottom of the screen explaining what the characters are saying.

Subtitled captions aren t only for dialogue. In the most dramatic, action-packed scenes of a movie, there might be no-one speaking, but there are plenty of sounds - a scream, a thrilling car chase And all these sounds need to be described as well.

In this programme, we ll be meeting Karli Witkowska, a subtitler who works on the Stranger Things show, to find out more. And of course, we ll be learning some useful new vocabulary as well.

But first I have a question for you, Neil. Movie subtitles are written ahead of time, but subtitling for live TV has to be done in the moment, as the person is speaking. This can lead to mistakes - sometimes very funny ones, including a subtitle which appeared in an interview for the BBC Six O Clock News in 2019. But what did the subtitle say? Was it:

a) We can t allow Spiderman to become prime minister?

b) We can t allow Superman to become prime minister?, or,

c) We can t allow Batman to become prime minister?