![ROH auditorium 001](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/ROH_auditorium_001.jpg)
Surtitles, also known as supertitles, SurCaps, OpTrans, are translated or transcribed
lyrics
Lyrics are words that make up a song, usually consisting of verses and choruses. The writer of lyrics is a lyricist. The words to an extended musical composition such as an opera are, however, usually known as a " libretto" and their writer, ...
/
dialogue projected above a stage or displayed on a screen, commonly used in
opera
Opera is a form of theatre in which music is a fundamental component and dramatic roles are taken by singers. Such a "work" (the literal translation of the Italian word "opera") is typically a collaboration between a composer and a libr ...
, theatre or other musical performances. The word "surtitle" comes from the
French language "sur", meaning "over" or "on", and the
English language
English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the ...
word "title", formed in a similar way to the related and similary-named
subtitle. The word ''Surtitle'' is a
trademark
A trademark (also written trade mark or trade-mark) is a type of intellectual property consisting of a recognizable sign, design, or expression that identifies products or services from a particular source and distinguishes them from othe ...
of the
Canadian Opera Company
The Canadian Opera Company (COC) is an opera company in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is the largest opera company in Canada and one of the largest producers of opera in North America. The COC performs in its own opera house, the Four Seasons Cent ...
.
Surtitles were introduced in the 1990s to translate the meaning of the lyrics into the audience's language, or to transcribe lyrics that may be difficult to understand in the sung form in the opera-house
''auditoria''. The two possible types of presentation of surtitles are as projected text, or as the
electronic libretto system. Titles in the theatre have proven a commercial success in areas such as opera, and are finding increased use for allowing
hearing-impaired
Hearing loss is a partial or total inability to hear. Hearing loss may be present at birth or acquired at any time afterwards. Hearing loss may occur in one or both ears. In children, hearing problems can affect the ability to acquire spoken l ...
patrons to enjoy theatre productions more fully. Surtitles are used in live productions in the same way as subtitles are used in
movie
A film also called a movie, motion picture, moving picture, picture, photoplay or (slang) flick is a work of visual art that simulates experiences and otherwise communicates ideas, stories, perceptions, feelings, beauty, or atmosphere ...
and
television
Television, sometimes shortened to TV, is a telecommunication medium for transmitting moving images and sound. The term can refer to a television set, or the medium of television transmission. Television is a mass medium for advertisin ...
productions.
Projected titles or translations
Generally projected above the theatre's
proscenium arch
A proscenium ( grc-gre, προσκήνιον, ) is the metaphorical vertical plane of space in a theatre, usually surrounded on the top and sides by a physical proscenium arch (whether or not truly "arched") and on the bottom by the stage floor ...
(but, alternately, on either side of the stage), surtitles are usually displayed using a supertitling machine. The text must be prepared beforehand as in
subtitles. These machines can be used for events other than artistic performances, when the text is easier to show to the audience than it is to vocalize.
Surtitles are different from
subtitles, which are more often used in
filmmaking
Filmmaking (film production) is the process by which a motion picture is produced. Filmmaking involves a number of complex and discrete stages, starting with an initial story, idea, or commission. It then continues through screenwriting, cast ...
and
television production
A television show – or simply TV show – is any content produced for viewing on a television set which can be broadcast via over-the-air, satellite, or cable, excluding breaking news, advertisements, or trailers that are typically placed be ...
. Originally, translations would be broken up into small chunks and photographed onto slides that could be projected onto a screen above the stage, but most companies now use a combination of video projectors and computers.
John Leberg developed the Surtitle system for the
Canadian Opera Company
The Canadian Opera Company (COC) is an opera company in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is the largest opera company in Canada and one of the largest producers of opera in North America. The COC performs in its own opera house, the Four Seasons Cent ...
when he was the company's director of operations.
Lotfi Mansouri
Lotfollah "Lotfi" Mansouri (15 June 1929 – 30 August 2013) was an Iranian-born opera director and manager. He was an opera director from about 1960 onwards, and is best known for being the General Director of the Canadian Opera Company and ...
, then general director of the company, first used the system in the January 1983 staging of ''
Elektra''.
[
"Lotfollah Mansouri." Marquis Who's Who TM. Marquis Who's Who, 2008.
Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale, 2008. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC
Document Number: K2013018226. Fee. Retrieved 27 December 2008.
]
New York City Opera
The New York City Opera (NYCO) is an American opera company located in Manhattan in New York City. The company has been active from 1943 through 2013 (when it filed for bankruptcy), and again since 2016 when it was revived.
The opera company, du ...
was the first American opera company to use supertitles, in 1983.
The surtitle is given an insertion point in the score (piano score) for the surtitle's entry and exit. An operator will push a button at the marked point when following the music.
The American company called
Figaro Systems established by Patrick Markle, Geoff Webb, and Ron Erkman developed the first assistive technology for individualized libretto-reading for audiences.
This technology allows the audience to select their preferred language from a list or simply turn it off, watching the performance without surtitles.
Personal titling systems
Surtitles can be a distraction, focusing attention on the titles instead of the stage. Therefore, several systems have been developed to provide captions visible only to those individual viewers who wish to see them.
Electronic libretto system
![Subtitles at the Santa Fe Opera (230480544)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/11/Subtitles_at_the_Santa_Fe_Opera_%28230480544%29.jpg)
The
electronic libretto system uses individual screens placed in front of each seat allowing patrons either to view a translation or to switch them off during the performance.
New York's
Metropolitan Opera
The Metropolitan Opera (commonly known as the Met) is an American opera company based in New York City, resident at the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center, currently situated on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The company is oper ...
installed the
patent
A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A ...
ed ''Met Titles'', becoming the first house in the
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...
to use this system.
The
Vienna State Opera
The Vienna State Opera (, ) is an opera house and opera company based in Vienna, Austria. The 1,709-seat Renaissance Revival venue was the first major building on the Vienna Ring Road. It was built from 1861 to 1869 following plans by August ...
and
Santa Fe Opera
Santa Fe Opera (SFO) is an American opera company, located north of Santa Fe, New Mexico. After creating the ''Opera Association of New Mexico'' in 1956, its founding director, John Crosby, oversaw the building of the first opera house on a newl ...
use such a system. It allows the patron to choose among several different languages.
Rear Window Captioning System
The
Rear Window Captioning System is a method for presenting, through captions, a transcript of the audio portion of a film in theatres. The system was co-developed by
WGBH and Rufus Butler Seder and initially targeted at people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing.
On the way into the theatre, viewers pick up a reflective plastic panel mounted on a flexible stalk. The panel sits in a seat cupholder or on the floor adjacent to the seat. A large LED display is mounted on a rear wall that displays caption characters in mirror image. Viewers move the panels into position (usually below the movie screen or stage) so they can read the reflected captions and watch the presentation. Others seated alongside do not watch, or usually even see, the captions.
Surtitling smartglasses
After a successful test run in 2015, the French-German surtitling company Panthea launched a pilot project on a larger scale introducing multilingual surtitles on smartglasses to the Festival d’Avignon 2017.
The system was the subject of a study which was later published by the French Ministry of Culture. The device became commercially-available the following year and was tested by several houses, such as the Opéra de Paris. The Theatre Times' test user report that: "Supertitles are displayed on the lenses during the performance so that you can concentrate more on what is happening on the stage rather than reading supertitles."
In October 2019, the Théâtre Édouard VII, in partnership with Panthea and La
Fondation pour l'audition (a non-profit foundation for the hearing-impaired), became the first Parisian theatre to offer surtitling smartglasses for a full season, providing the service at no extra cost for audience members with hearing impairments.
See also
*
Same language subtitling 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 as it beca ...
*
Subtitles
*
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 ...
*
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 i ...
*
Radio Marconi
Radio is the technology of signaling and communicating using radio waves. Radio waves are electromagnetic waves of frequency between 30 hertz (Hz) and 300 gigahertz (GHz). They are generated by an electronic device called a transmit ...
References
External links
Guide des difficultés de rédaction en musique (GDRM): Guides > Surtitres et sous-titres in French
Surtitles (official site)Opera Supertitles rental librarySubtivals a
free software
Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...
for surtitling
Qstit another
free software
Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...
for surtitling, developed by
Nova Cinema.
Radio MarconiSupertitles.gr Windows software for projecting surtitles (commercial)
Spectitular surtitling & subtitling software developed by Panthea
{{opera terms
Assistive technology
Opera terminology
Canadian inventions