subtitling

factsheet Access Services
Subtitling

Access Services
Subtitling

The importance of subtitling for audiovisual content has risen steadily in recent years and will continue to rise even more in the future. This is due to a variety of reasons:

  • The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has been ratified in almost all European countries and is gradually being as adopted into national law. This requires the countries to ensure that people with sensory disabilities have a guaranteed right of access to information. For people who are hearing-impaired, it is subtitles which ensure access.
  • Those responsible for making programmes are increasingly discovering that they are able to win additional viewers thanks to subtitles. For instance, non-native speakers can understand the content more easily. If audiovisual content is broadcast on social networks and consumed on the move, it is only understandable thanks to subtitles.
  • And finally, subtitles help to find the right point within a programme, whether this an internet search engine or internally in an archive.

SWISS TXT has been creating subtitles in French, German and Italian for public television in Switzerland for 30 years. It creates selectable intralingual subtitles for people who are hearing-impaired and interlingual subtitles built into the image, which we create and distribute using the mediahub media management system. In addition to subtitles for public television, we create subtitles for numerous private suppliers who have outsourced this task to us.

Creating subtitles is a very labour-intensive task which only remains profitable with trained staff, streamlined processes, efficient technology and continuous innovation. This is because subtitling also involves the upstream and downstream processes, such as sourcing the videos or embedding the subtitles into the image signal. SWISS TXT operates the Access Media Cloud for public television in Switzerland in addition to subtitling. It is only this proximity that enables us to implement the necessary processes flexibly and directly.