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Comment by rwmj | Hacker News Reader

Since I live with someone whose first language isn't English I basically watch everything with subtitles. And live subtitling - while it's a thing - isn't that good. Try turning on subtitles for something like a news programme or live broadcast and it'll usually be quite delayed, with lots of misspellings and even outright wrong text. (This is true for premier public broadcasters in the UK such as the BBC, I don't know if this is solved better in other countries).

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...

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We have subtitles on all the time for my little boy and can attest that the BBC is very poor - even on iPlayer.

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...

Totally agree, the "live" subtitling on BBC is remarkably bad.

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.

Surely not, syncapatocaption is infallible.

Nobody can type fast enough on QWERTY to keep up with human speech, so the comparison is versus chorded typing on a stenography keyboard, or someone repeating the dialogue into voice dictation software which is obviously prone to errors.

As someone who watches TV news with subtitles on, whatever entry technique they're using, the result is not very good [in the UK, can't speak for other countries].

Sure, but the closed captioning is still extremely good. The typists use chorded keyboards for speed and yes they occasionally make mistakes but everything is generally quite clear and accurate.

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.

I'm not deaf, don't know any sign language, am not close friends with anyone who does.

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.

Yes, but.

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.

Sign language (at least ASL) involves a lot of facial expression in addition to using your hands. There's a lot of room to creatively translate the unspoken message in a vocal inflection into signed message.

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.

I don't know much about sign language. Does it use a different grammar from English?

Yes, it's best to consider it an entirely different language rather than replacements of words.

I learned UK and USA use incompatible versions of sign language from online discussion of a recent television show.

Transcription can lose meaning, as text is not a 1:1 replacement for speech. You lose cadence, stress and emotion.

>Sure, but the closed captioning is still extremely good. The typists use chorded keyboards for speed and yes they occasionally make mistakes but everything is generally quite clear and accurate.

Live subtitling (on the BBC at least) is mainly done using re-speaking and voice recognition, rather than typing.

But it's being done by professional translators, right? That might be more expensive than having a human do live subtitle transcription, but I bet it's not a huge difference especially relative to the production costs of any broadcast to a large audience, and based on the live subtitles I've seen (mostly on national sports and news broadcasts, so I don't know if that's automated or done by a human) it's hard imagine the quality achieved by professional signers wouldn't be significantly better.

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