When you are watching a live TV news or sports programme with the subtitles on, someone somewhere is listening to those voices and repeating what they say into complex software, which then types it out onto your screen. One of those people is Asha Gill
We tend to notice subtitles more when they haven’t got it right. Some random word or sentence, which bears no resemblance to what the person on TV has just said, pops up on your screen. But behind every sentence you see, there is a person, like Asha Gill, sitting in a studio – or more likely these days at home – trying to make sure it’s word perfect.
Asha has been a live subtitler for four years. She’s worked for companies such as Sky News and Deluxe, which supplies subtitlers to a number of channels. It’s a fast-paced job where high levels of concentration are needed for intense periods of time and some breaking news stories – such as the collapse of the apartment building in Miami in June, where families are emotionally talking to camera crews as they try to find their loved ones – can be traumatic to work on.
It’s one of those jobs that you wouldn’t necessarily think of as a career choice, but is fascinating once you’re in. ‘Most people get into it having studied broadcast media as it’s an aspect of film-making or TV production and it’s often used as a stepping stone to go into other parts of media. But I got into it from a completely different angle. I was watching TV one day and saw the subtitling credits at the end for Deluxe and I thought it would be an interesting job, so I searched them up and they happened to be hiring.’
With pre-recorded programmes, there’s obviously plenty of time to get the text right, but with live shows – particularly with more than one or two people speaking – it’s much more complex.
Says Asha: ‘You need software connected to the TV, showing what’s going out live, you need voice recognition software, subtitling software and, now we’re working from home, VPNs (virtual private network) and remote desktops. If something goes wrong, it could be any number of things!’
The software that is putting out the text is not following the voices on the TV, but Asha’s. She is listening to what the speaker is saying at the same time as you are watching it. As she listens she then repeats what she hears to the software which begins to type it out. But, as she says, ‘Nobody speaks with commas and full stops, so you have to put this in. And if more than one person is talking, then you have to differentiate this with different coloured text.’ Just try it yourself next time you watch TV!
To help her to follow the speaker as closely as possible, the software has learned to recognise not only how Asha speaks but certain command words, too: ‘So, if two people were talking, I would need the text to be different colours and I’d say “Hello, full stop, macro yellow. Hello, full stop, how are you, question mark, macro white.” I’ve trained my software to change the text colour when I say macro yellow or macro white, although you could use any word. Most people use macro X or Y etc.
‘I’ve got a standard London accent, but we have people who have thicker accents or are from a different country and the software over time will learn how you talk and can understand you better as it then translates onto the screen.’
But, of course, the software doesn’t always get it right. ‘If the software has misunderstood something, the subtitler has to go back and manually change it, which delays it from going out, which why the text can sometimes be far behind what the person is saying.’ Asha also has to watch the TV and move the text if it’s suddenly covering someone’s face or there are on-screen graphics which are being hidden.
There are highs and lows to the job. A high was working during the US election results: ‘I was literally on air as it was officially announced that Joe Biden had won the elections in the United States.’
But it can be difficult, she says, when she hears racist comments ‘or you have to subtitle someone infuriating, such as Donald Trump’. But the worst days were listening – and repeating – stories during the pandemic: ‘People lost their loved ones, they have watched their relatives die and they couldn’t help. Sky News do pieces from all over the world, like Brazil, and they showed shocking scenes of dead bodies in the street. But when you speak you have to take the emotion out of what’s happening as it serves no purpose and might disrupt the software, so you have to sound like a complete robot. It’s hard.’
So, next time you’re watching a live news programme and the subtitles are a little slow, think of the person sitting at their dining room table trying to keep up. And if the subtitles suddenly don’t make sense, blame the software.
Helping others
As well as being a freelance subtitler, Asha is also a Communication Support Worker with deaf college students. This means she will sit in on a class with the student and sign or tell them what the teacher and other students are saying. ‘I helped one student who was studying dress-making, so I learned a lot about that!’
She also is training to be a Lipspeaker. Lipspeakers clearly reproduce what another person is saying. You often see them at press conferences, for instance, but Asha is learning so that she can accompany hard of hearing or deaf patients to GP or hospital appointments, so that she can clearly repeat what is being said to them.’
Pippa Duncan