Deaf people who speak sign language natively approach English as a second language. And it is hard to learn a spoken language when deaf. English literacy rates among ASL native speakers are rather low.
Now imagine trying to learn how to do that when you have never heard any words spoken out loud.
People who are deaf from birth often have a lot of difficulty with spelling and reading, because both skills are closely connected to saying and hearing words. Connecting written words to lip movements (which is kind of the closest thing to 'phonics' for a deaf person) is lossy - the letter-to-lip connections are fuzzier than letter-to-sound, and lip-to-letter is very ambiguous.
Subtitles are great for people who are confident and comfortable readers - say, people who have become deaf due to age - but for some deaf people following subtitles can be like asking someone who's dyslexic to quickly read a sentence out loud.
Anyway my theory is that sign language interpreters may be much better at this because sign language uses the same areas of the brain as speaking[1] so they're able to listen and sign much more intuitively than typing. Think if you were able to listen and speak at the same time without your "speech" drowning out what you are listening to.
[1] https://maxplanckneuroscience.org/language-is-more-than-spea...
On the other hand, signing involves actual translation, not just transcription, which is much more likely to drop meaning or introduce confusion. Translation is already hard enough, and live translation is a whole other level of difficulty.
However, I understand that it's much easier to be expressive in sign language. Non-verbal language used by the speaker - sarcasm, tone, inflection - either translate badly, or get lost entirely when transliterating into subtitles. A talented sign-language translator is able to carry this over much better.
Now, you’re getting the inflection of the interpreter and not the speaker (derivative). Certainly you’re not hearing inflection on the original orator, either, so maybe it’s a mixed bag.
Subtitles in general, and live captioning especially, avoid editorializing or taking creative license- they're literal translations of words without other cues added in.
One nice exception to this has been the community subtitling work involved in various Taskmaster spinoff series, where explanations for cultural jokes or idioms are added into the subtitles for foreign audiences, especially when the joke is a pun or relies on a mispronounced word to make sense.
Live subtitling (on the BBC at least) is mainly done using re-speaking and voice recognition, rather than typing.
Interesting side note: if ever subtitles are turned off, or we are watching TV elsewhere, me and my wife can't 'hear' well. Even if the volume is up. Like we've untrained our ability...
It's way worse than even using a cheap computer with open source solutions - it's strange no one at the BBC decides to resolve this as it would be easy and could easily give the public a far better result. Even if you took a hit on the most obscure words, off the shelf would outperform the current process by a country mile.
Watch someone signing: they use their face and body to convey emotions like anger, confusion, hesitation, love, joy, and the rest of the human range.
And that's the "original" emotion, it's not filtered through another human being. When you watch a movie without audio and with subtitles (like in a bar or on a bus), the emotions of the speakers are already awfully clear from the visuals.
For example, if we ask a question, it's not just that our voice goes up at the end. Our eyes move in a certain way too, slightly more opened and our eyebrows and sometimes cheeks raise.
And nobody's at a distance, the cameras are always on either a medium or close-up shot when filming politicians speaking.
If subtitles were equal value or even “good enough”, they’d be used exclusively. That they aren’t should tell you something, and you repeatedly protesting that you are unable to comprehend the value doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
Separately, relatively dry sarcasm can't be visually picked up directly, but a signer may be able to suggest some of that with body/hand language.
I don't know how you'd possibly attempt to objectively quantify that degree, but my guess is that you're understating it. The entire deaf community is probably not mistaken about which means of communication are the most effective for them.
Yes, but a deaf person has trouble hearing how the speaker is speaking. They're missing out on the emotion in the voice.
Consider all of the emotion that can be conveyed in an audiobook, or on a phone call, or through music. Humans convey a lot of emotion in sound that is not represented visually. Part of sign language is conveying the emotion usually present in speech.
No, you can’t; how much emotion is shown via those things vs. tone, volume, and other auditory cues varies from speaker to speaker and speech to speech; sometimes, speakers demonstrate one emotion through gestures but indicate that it is insincere/being mocked/etc. via vocal cues, even.
Not to mention the degree to which simultaneously tracking face and subtitles makes you likely to miss parts of either or both.
https://www.british-sign.co.uk/what-is-british-sign-language...
For someone who is profoundly deaf from birth and who can't lipread, the way we speak and write is a massive struggle. Cochlear implants before a year old are much more common now, while the brain is still more malleable, so there's maybe less and less deaf people who are totally profoundly deaf and you may not realise what it's like for them if you never come across them.
I don’t know too much about it but I had read recently that ASL sign language can be thought of as a different language, rather than a direct equivalent to text subtitles[2].
[1] https://eegent.com/icap [2] https://imanyco.com/closed-captions-and-sign-language-not-a-...
Yes, it is a different language. I've heard that ASL is rather similar to French Sign Language and quite different from BSL (British Sign Language). If someone were to translate something from English into ASL, and someone else were to translate the ASL back into English, I'd expect the result to be as different from the original as if they'd gone via some other language, like Italian, for example.
(Apparently derived from the fact that in Italy, there's quite a lot more non-verbal communication with hand gestures than other parts of the world)
But in any case, deaf people still have the need to practice reading their language, so removing it from everywhere except IRL conversations might be detrimental to them