Open or closed captioning?

Which type of subtitles do you need? Open subtitles are for the general public. Closed captions give extra information to the deaf and hard of hearing. LexiQ offers both.

Open captioning: for the general public

Open captions are the subtitles you know from the cinema. If they are made well, you hardly notice that you’re reading them. Open captions are ‘built in’ to your video. They can’t be turned off. This kind of subtitling is used to make your original audio comprehensible to people watching without sound, people who don’t understand the original language or dialect or people who are in a noisy location.

Intralingual and interlingual

By adding translated subtitles to your videos, you reach a greater audience worldwide. Then, we are talking about interlingual, or translated, subtitles. The source (or original) language is, for example, English, and the target languages are, for example, French and Dutch.

A good subtitler ensures that the target audience picks up on the content’s humour, emotion and style in translated subtitles. For this, we use transcreation (creative translation) and localisation (adaptation to the local culture).

In intralingual subtitling, the same language is subtitled as the original source language. This is handy, for example, to represent dialects in standard language, but also to help viewers who watch your video content without audio to follow along.

Closed captioning: for the hard of hearing

Closed captions are primarily meant for the hard of hearing. Viewers can turn these captions on and off. When you watch TV in Belgium, you can do that on Teletext page 888. Closed captions are separate from the video footage, so they are not ‘burnt’ into the video. Closed captioning requires more text, because extra information is given for things that people who are hard of hearing cannot hear (‘door slams shut’, ‘telephone rings’, etc.).

Subtitling in combination with voice-over translation

Imagine: you’ve created a French report, which not only has dialogues, but also a vocal commentary, or ‘voice-over’. You want to make this report accessible to an English-speaking audience. Then we make a subtitle file for you for the English subtitles, and we deliver the translated commentary texts, as well. Here, it’s important for the subtitles and voice-over text to be consistent with one another. Do you want to have the commentary texts voiced, as well? You ask for it, and we help!