Same language subtitling (SLS) refers to the practice of subtitling 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) and subtitling are both processes of displaying text on a television, video screen, or other visual display to provide additional or interpretive information. Both are typically used as a transcription of the audio po ...

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 CCIR 653 (now ITU-R BT.653 ...

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

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), 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 and dependencies by population, second-most populous ...

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

Laserdisc The LaserDisc (LD) is a home video format and the first commercial optical disc storage medium, initially licensed, sold and marketed as MCA DiscoVision (also known simply as "DiscoVision") in the United States in 1978. Its diameter typical ...

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

Karaoke Karaoke (; ; , clipped compound of Japanese ''kara'' "empty" and ''ōkesutora'' "orchestra") is a type of interactive entertainment usually offered in clubs and bars, where people sing along to recorded music using a microphone. The music is ...

PA system, the concept was subsequently adapted for the 1986 multi-format

Disney Sing-Along Songs ''Disney Sing-Along Songs'' is a series of videos on VHS, betamax, laserdisc, and DVD with musical moments from various Disney films, TV shows, and attractions. Lyrics for the songs are sometimes displayed on-screen with the Mickey Mouse i ...

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 characters are interwo ...

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 DVD discs. DVD-Video was the dominant consumer home video format in Asia, North America, Europe, and Australia in the 2000s until it was supplanted by the high-definition Blu- ...

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 Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIM Ahmedabad) is the world's number 1 business school, located in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. The school has been accorded the status of an Institute of National Importance by Ministry of Human Resourc ...

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; Hindi: , ) is an Indian public service broadcaster founded by the Government of India, owned by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting and one of Prasar Bharati's two divisions. One of India's largest bro ...

's film song programmes in

Hindi Hindi (Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Hindi has been de ...

Bengali Bengali or Bengalee, or Bengalese may refer to: *something of, from, or related to Bengal, a large region in South Asia * Bengalis, an ethnic and linguistic group of the region * Bengali language, the language they speak ** Bengali alphabet, the w ...

Gujarati Gujarati may refer to: * something of, from, or related to Gujarat, a state of India * Gujarati people, the major ethnic group of Gujarat * Gujarati language, the Indo-Aryan language spoken by them * Gujarati languages, the Western Indo-Aryan sub ...

Marathi Marathi may refer to: *Marathi people, an Indo-Aryan ethnolinguistic group of Maharashtra, India *Marathi language, the Indo-Aryan language spoken by the Marathi people *Palaiosouda, also known as Marathi, a small island in Greece See also * * ...

Telugu Telugu may refer to: * Telugu language, a major Dravidian language of India *Telugu people, an ethno-linguistic group of India * Telugu script, used to write the Telugu language ** Telugu (Unicode block), a block of Telugu characters in Unicode S ...

Tamil Tamil may refer to: * Tamils, an ethnic group native to India and some other parts of Asia **Sri Lankan Tamils, Tamil people native to Sri Lanka also called ilankai tamils **Tamil Malaysians, Tamil people native to Malaysia * Tamil language, nativ ...

Kannada Kannada (; ಕನ್ನಡ, ), originally romanised Canarese, is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by the people of Karnataka in southwestern India, with minorities in all neighbouring states. It has around 47 million native s ...

Malayalam Malayalam (; , ) is a Dravidian language spoken in the Indian state of Kerala and the union territories of Lakshadweep and Puducherry (Mahé district) by the Malayali people. It is one of 22 scheduled languages of India. Malayalam was des ...

Odia Odia, also spelled Oriya or Odiya, may refer to: * Odia people in Odisha, India * Odia language, an Indian language, belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family * Odia alphabet, a writing system used for the Odia languag ...

, 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 in the Indian subcontinent, in which patterns are created on the floor or a tabletop using materials such as powdered lime stone, red ochre, dry rice flour, coloured sand, quartz powder, flower petal ...

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 (, especially when referring to written Chinese) is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in Greater China. About 1.3 billion people (or approximately 16% of the wor ...

programmes are often subtitled, because speakers of other

varieties of Chinese Chinese, also known as Sinitic, is a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family consisting of hundreds of local varieties, many of which are not mutually intelligible. Variation is particularly strong in the more mountainous southeast of main ...

can read

Standard Written Chinese Written vernacular Chinese, also known as Baihua () or Huawen (), is the forms of written Chinese based on the varieties of Chinese spoken throughout China, in contrast to Classical Chinese, the written standard used during imperial China up to ...

, even if they cannot understand the spoken dialect.

Literacy promotion

Implementation

Outside India

See also

References

Further reading