Same language subtitling (SLS) refers to the practice of

subtitling Subtitles are texts representing the contents of the audio in a film, television show, opera or other audiovisual media. Subtitles might provide a transcription or translation of spoken dialogue. Although naming conventions can vary, caption ...

programs on TV in the same language as the audio. Initially introduced in the early 1970s as a means to make services available to the hard of hearing,

closed captioning Closed captioning (CC) is the process of displaying text on a television, video screen, or other visual display to provide additional or interpretive information, where the viewer is given the choice of whether the text is displayed. Closed cap ...

as it became known was standardized for Latin alphabets in the 1976

World System Teletext World System Teletext (WST) is the name of a standard for encoding and displaying teletext information, which is used as the standard for teletext throughout Europe today. It was adopted into the international standard ITU-R, CCIR 653 (now ITU-R ...

agreement. Non-Latin character set services have subsequently been introduced, and are used in

India India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area; the List of countries by population (United Nations), most populous country since ...

, and in China to also aid literacy. In the mid-1980s Pioneer introduced a range of

Laserdisc LaserDisc (LD) is a home video format and the first commercial optical disc storage medium. It was developed by Philips, Pioneer Corporation, Pioneer, and the movie studio MCA Inc., MCA. The format was initially marketed in the United State ...

based Karaoke machines, with subtitled Music video playback combined with a

Karaoke is a type of interactive entertainment system usually offered in nightclubs and bars, where people sing along to pre-recorded accompaniment using a microphone. Its musical content is an instrumental rendition of a well-known popular song. I ...

PA system, the concept was subsequently adapted for the 1986 multi-format Disney Sing-Along Songs series, and later transferred to the PlayStation 2, and subsequent games consoles, and has in parallel been adapted to classroom use of synchronized captioning of

musical Musical is the adjective of music. Musical may also refer to: * Musical theatre, a performance art that combines songs, spoken dialogue, acting and dance * Musical film Musical film is a film genre in which songs by the Character (arts), charac ...

lyrics (or any text with an Audio and/or Video source) as a Repeated Reading activity. The 1996

DVD-Video DVD-Video is a consumer video format used to store digital video on DVDs. DVD-Video was the dominant consumer home video format in most of the world in the 2000s. As of 2024, it competes with the high-definition Blu-ray Disc, while both rece ...

standard was published with support for up to 32 separate synchronised subtitling streams to be packaged with a video file.

Literacy promotion

This idea was struck upon by Brij Kothari, who believed that SLS makes reading practice an incidental, automatic, and subconscious part of popular TV entertainment, at a low per-person cost to shore up literacy rates in India.
Brij Kothari
'' from
Ashoka.org
Accessed on February 10, 2009Biswas, Ranjita (2005).
Hindi film songs can boost literacy rates in India
'' Brij Kothari was watching a Spanish film on video with English subtitles during a break from dissertation writing in 1996 when the thought hit him that if all Hindi film songs were subtitled in Hindi, on television in India, it would bring about a revolution in literacy. Upon completion of his academic pursuits Kothari returned to India. In late 1996 he joined the faculty of the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. While continuing to teach communication to MBA students, he started work on SLS and it became a project of IIM. The idea of SLS was first innovated, researched, pioneered and nationalized by the Centre for Educational Innovation, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad under Kothari. The program took off on a national scale by August 2002. Before Kothari's study, most available research on captioning had demonstrated limited results. As a direct result of Kothari's success with subtitled music video there are several new related studies using technology and music video that are also showing remarkable results.

Implementation

During the last 10 years in India, SLS has been implemented on

Doordarshan Doordarshan (), abbreviated as DD, is India's State-owned enterprise, state-owned public broadcasting, public television broadcaster. Established by the Government of India on 15 September 1959, it is owned by the Ministry of Information and B ...

's film song programmes in

Hindi Modern Standard Hindi (, ), commonly referred to as Hindi, is the Standard language, standardised variety of the Hindustani language written in the Devanagari script. It is an official language of India, official language of the Government ...

, Bengali, Gujarati,

Marathi Marathi may refer to: *Marathi people, an Indo-Aryan ethnolinguistic group of Maharashtra, India **Marathi people (Uttar Pradesh), the Marathi people in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh *Marathi language, the Indo-Aryan language spoken by the Mar ...

, Telugu,

Tamil Tamil may refer to: People, culture and language * Tamils, an ethno-linguistic group native to India, Sri Lanka, and some other parts of Asia **Sri Lankan Tamils, Tamil people native to Sri Lanka ** Myanmar or Burmese Tamils, Tamil people of Ind ...

Kannada Kannada () is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly in the state of Karnataka in southwestern India, and spoken by a minority of the population in all neighbouring states. It has 44 million native speakers, and is additionally a ...

Malayalam Malayalam (; , ) is a Dravidian languages, Dravidian language spoken in the Indian state of Kerala and the union territories of Lakshadweep and Puducherry (union territory), Puducherry (Mahé district) by the Malayali people. It is one of ...

, Odia, and Punjabi. For each language the subtitles are in the same language as the audio. A 2002–2007 Nielsen-ORG study demonstrated that the ability to read a paragraph among schoolchildren jumped from 25% to 56% when exposed to 30 minutes a week of the

Rangoli Rangoli is an art form that originates from the Indian subcontinent, in which patterns are created on the floor or a tabletop using materials such as powdered limestone, red ochre, dry rice flour, coloured sand, quartz powder, Petal, flower ...

program with subtitles. Over 90% said they prefer having subtitles on songs owing to their interest in the lyrics.Kothari, Brij (2000). "10: Same Language Subtitling on Indian Television". ''Redeveloping Communication for Social Change: Theory, Practice, and Power''. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 135-146. The basic SLS reading activity involves students viewing a short subtitled presentation projected on-screen, while completing a response worksheet. Ideally, the subtitling should have high quality synchronization of audio and text, text should change colors in syllabic synchronization to audio model, and the source media should be dynamic and engaging.McCall, W. (2008). Same-Language-Subtitling and Karaoke: The Use of Subtitled Music as a Reading Activity in a High School Special Education Classroom. In K. McFerrin et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education International Conference 2008 (pp. 1190-1195). Chesapeake, VA: AACE.http://go.editlib.org/p/27350

Outside India

Chinese-language Chinese ( or ) is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and List of ethnic groups in China, many minority ethnic groups in China, as well as by various communities of the Chinese diaspora. Approximately 1.39& ...

programmes are often subtitled, because speakers of other

varieties of Chinese There are hundreds of local Chinese language varieties forming a branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages, Sino-Tibetan language family, many of which are not Mutual intelligibility, mutually intelligible. Variation is particularly strong in the m ...

can read Standard Written Chinese, even if they cannot understand the spoken dialect.

Hebrew language Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and remained in regular use as a first language unti ...

programming is also subtitled, mainly the imported programs on channels like Arutz Heyalim.

Literacy promotion

Implementation

Outside India

See also

References

Further reading