Censorship by omission as subtitles get lost for words

If you’re going to write subtitles, get them right. As a self-confessed pedant and difficult person, I enjoy generalised complaining about the state of the world. But among my pet hates is when the subtitles for a TV show or film don’t match the audible dialogue. Yes, that matters. It’s not as petty as it may sound. OK, fair enough. When I say it, it probably is petty. I have good hearing so I don’t need subtitles. The brief explanation is using subtitles is a habit I developed when a genetic condition caused my vision to deteriorate severely.

It’s amazing how much of communication is contained in seeing the subtleties of facial expressions, so having the dialogue on the screen as a second source of information helped me to follow along.

I had surgery on my eyes a few times (yeah, that’s kind of ouchie) and now I’m doing fine. I keep the subtitles up out of habit and I really feel for people who have to rely on them – because they are often terrible.

Some of it is sloppiness, and some of it is cultural. Seeing North American Netflix captions say “Mom” when I can clearly hear “Mum” on a British TV show annoys the hell out of me, and you can tell when the person typing the words hasn’t travelled much because many nuances of language are missed.

Some of it is just poor quality, often caused by the

“Karamo Brown was criticising Netflix for removing swearing

automation creeping into such services. However clever they get, computers are stupid.

But when it’s censorship, that’s when we all need to speak out, verbally or in text.

So I snarled in agreement last week when I read that Queer Eye host Karamo Brown was criticising Netflix for removing swearing from their subtitles.

Cutting phrases for brevity is bad enough – and discriminatory against the deaf – but protecting them from profanity is insulting. If you can say it on TV, you can type it in a caption.

Media companies should commit to inclusivity. There should be no half-measures in efforts to make services accessible to as many people as possible.

If you’re going to do something that matters, do it well.