A Lightning Talk
On 14th October I gave a brief talk about measuring subtitle quality as a lightning talk at Dorkbot Bristol. It was a severely cutdown version of my IBC presentation for an audience of technically and artistically minded people. When asked the question, who here uses subtitles, not quite half of the audience raised their hands and almost all of them use same language subtitles, so I had a receptive audience.
This was the first time I’d given a talk on this work where it wasn’t being recorded so I felt free to give more details about which TV channels were being represented in the plots and led to audible gasps in one case. The audience response has given me confidence in the relevance of the topic for a non-specialist audience and will be seeking out more opportunities to talk about this work and gather feedback.
One topic that came up in the later conversations was the issue of censorship of swear words in subtitles. This is a longstanding issue, dating back to the early days of subtitles. Indeed, Prof Alan Newell who led the early work on subtitling has claimed that “A further interesting finding was the difference between the impact of the spoken and written word, the most obvious example being the use of swear words. These have a greater impact when read as subtitles rather than when heard.”[1] This attitude, was also espoused by the likes of the infamous reactionary Mary Whitehouse and when combined with other patronising attitudes towards disability this led to the censorship of swear words subtitles. These attitudes are now returning with YouTube censoring words in automatic captions, though this can be disabled.[2] Netflix has also been called out for its censorship of subtitles with their audience complaining about the service misrepresenting, censoring and simplifying dialogue from a variety of shows.
One of the issues which both YouTube and mainstream broadcasters face is speech to text systems outputting swear words in error when there are similar sounding words in the speech. In the case of broadcasters, these systems replace swear words, pre-watershed but are switched off post-watershed. The exception the BBC makes is during coverage of the Glastonbury Festival where censorship of the subtitles causes a barrage of complaints, so the system has to be switched off for the duration.
As a result of this feedback, I’m intending to add a check for censorship in subtitles, though the initial challenge is to check that the speech to text system I am using does not have censorship trained into it.
[1] Design and the Digital Divide: Insights from 40 Years in Computer Support for Older and Disabled People. Alan F. Newell, Morgan & Claypool Publishers 2011 (page 33) https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-01592-2
[2] How to Uncensor the Automatic Captions. Gabe the Slacker. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTdHXCXETcQ