Hi, everyone!
I’ve been reading Subtitle formatting, which has been amazingly helpful. However, I realized something that I need clarification on when it comes to VIKI. Captioning is different from subtitling, so this question pertains specifically to captioning.
When you subtitle, you don’t put in sound descriptions, such as (Yelling), (Laughing), etc. However, with captioning these types of cues are very important as many people who read these captions are hard of hearing or deaf.
So, when it comes to captioning a show with English audio into English captions, shouldn’t I include these types of things as long as it doesn’t make the captions messy? I personally think these types of things are necessary, but I’d like to hear others’ opinions as I’m new to VIKI.
Thank you in advance for your response.
I have noticed that C-dramas can often have explanations of dialog in parentheses. If a character is using an idiomatic Chinese expression to describe something, the English equivalent will be in parentheses.
For example, I have heard for years that a tall person–I am tall–is described as “a crane among the chickens.” So a subtitle might be “Ning Ning is a crane among the chickens (stands out because she is so tall.” Or maybe it’s the reverse: “Ning Ning is very tall (lit., a crane among the chickens).”
Maybe because I am used to English subs offering information to help me get a sense of the original language, I don’t notice them that much. It’s undoubtedly the same with information that needs to be captioned. I think people don’t pay attention to them except on a subconscious level, so for them, captions don’t make subs “messy.”
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