Okay, so how are subtitles different?
The essential function of subtitles and closed captions is to enable a viewer to read dialogue (or contextual audio elements) without needing to either hear or understand the audio. It may be in the same language or not.
As one example, in some Chinese markets TV and movies are all subtitled in Chinese, not (primarily) for the deaf, but because the standard Chinese subtitles are intelligible to readers whose only spoken language is a mutually unintelligible dialect.