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How many of you would recognize SOS in morse code if you heard it?
@freemo Granted, not /hearing/ in my case. But seeing the pattern I'd recognize it.
@trinsec Fair enough. Perhaps I should have been a little less specific with my wording. Though your answer is certainly a unique perspective on this question and a surprising answer honestly. I'd suspect a good portion of people with hearing wouldn't recognize it, so to know it without being able to hear is even more surprising as you'd have less exposure to it I'd imagine. Like if it was in a movie it likely would describe it in that level of detail in the subtitles.
By the way sidenote I often watch shows with subtitles as it isnt always clear what the dialogue says in some places. What I've noticed is the subtitles are generally not very well thought out. they tend to give away details that you wouldnt know from watching it with sound and no subtitles to the point that it can ruin elements of suspense. I often take mental note as to how that is inconsiderate of the deaf when it comes to portraying the artistic intent of a movie, its basically a spoiler for events that are about to happen.
For example I notice a lot of times the captions will give the name of the person speaking if they arent on camera. But often time the movie does it in a way where you arent really suppose to pick up on whose voice yoru hearing, as that is revealed later through context, but the captions ruin that reveal.
@freemo Well, I've read adventure books as teenager, and some movies used a flashlight for the SOS signal. Panic Room comes to mind, for example.
It's probably not as uncommon as you'd think. ;)
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And if you see subtitles that doesn't care about spoilers and timing... that broadcaster / publisher chose the cheapest subtitler they could hire. Happens often enough, sadly.
Of course, I wouldn't always be able to gauge the quality, being deaf myself.. So I'm at the mercy of the ableist hearing culture. :P
Sometimes there are advantages. Like in the movie someone speaks Italian, and it gets straightly translated in the subtitles. Gives us some different perspective than the people who don't have subtitles turned on and who don't know Italian. ;) I saw a movie like that once with my bro and he had to laugh his ass off. For me it was uh... a normal movie, for him it was extra funny hearing Italian and reading the translations. :P
Of course, they can be lazy and do '[Speaks Italian]' instead... in those cases I sometimes wish to read the actual Italian words, so that I maybe could pick up some context there.
I saw The 6th Sense in the cinemas with normal translated subtitles. I didn't quite understand that movie.
A few years later I watched that movie again on DVD, with closed captioning this time. I could understand the movie 100% and was way more impressed because I could pick up all the nuances thanks to the closed captioning.
In general I find BBC movie subtitles to be of good quality.
Dutch ones are slowly getting there, but aren't perfect yet.
And the Dutch subtitles for the general Dutch audience (translated text, not closed captioning) usually doesn't include the music lyrics, so those music scenes are damn boring for me. :(
@trinsec Fair point. But still less exposure than your typical person who would have had those queues, plus the auditory ones. So if the general public only picks up on it half the time I'd expect a deaf person to know about it even less, at least on average.
The translation example you gave to me doesnt entierly strike me as an advantage. Typically in a movie it is intended that the viewer wont know the translation. Part of the story line is the expectation that the viewer needs to infer what is happening by tone and guess what is said, adding tot he mystery and the plot. So to have scenes translated that were meant to not be understood, to me at least, seems like a violation of the artistic integrity of the movie more so than an advantage.
That said if your watching a movie the second time through to know what is said during a foreign language scene might at least be a cool sort of trivia or insight.
Most of the subtitles I watch are from Netflix actually. so my view of the quality of subtitles is entirely correlated to whatever the quality of the netflix subtitles happen to be. with that said I always assumed the subtitles for most movies were universal and distributed with the movie itself and not reinvented for every broadcaster.
