DaveBee wrote:it estimated in a blog post that there are only about 100 – 150 professional Dutch subtitlers on the planet.
That probably helps to explain the extremely low quality of "ondertiteling" on the Dutch public broadcast news at 8:00 PM daily:
https://www.npo.nl/nos-journaal-20-00-uur/NOSjnl2000Now to be fair, they do say that the "ondertitling" may suffer because it is live. But it is never improved, even though there is a large archive of the 8:00 PM news, and Dutch public broadcasters are required to provide quality subtitles. I am surprised that Dutch nationals who have a hearing impairment, and rely on subtitles, put up with this poor quality. It may be that they don't realize how poor the subtitling is. To be fair, the subtitles for what the news anchor says are a bit better, but a large part of the news consists of interviews and statements by other people. That is notoriously bad, and normally huge portions of such talking are totally missing. The subtitlers take great poetic licence to use different words, expressions and grammar, and often not to shorten it but just to make it different. About once a week, on a random basis, the subtitles are very much better, indicating that it can be done, or that there is at least one good subtitler on staff. But the rest of the time, it is poor. People on the news broadcasts, especially public figures such as politicians, should insist that the subtitles say what they said.
For other Dutch public broadcaster programming such as series and documentaries, the subtitles are very good. Granted, there is more time to do it correctly, not like the live news. But with today's technology of speech-to-text and related aids, and with the script of the news anchor, and with many of the interviews having been done well in advance of the "live" broadcast, they could do better, much better. Sometimes I use Google Translate in the speech-to-text mode, and it often does a lot better than the subtitles.
I am only a foreign Dutch language learner, so NOS Journaal has no mandate to worry about me. But again, I find it hard to believe that the people these subtitles are targetted at, the hearing impaired, put up with such poor, incomplete and inadequate subtitles.
In Canada, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation provides closed-captions of the news on both English and French channels. They are remarkably accurate. The only problem is the way too much latency (delay) to make them useful for a language learner to synchronize with the audio in real time. However, using recordings and closed-caption transcriptions can be very useful and effective for the French and English news broadcasts.
I wonder what people think of the subtitles on live news casts on other stations and in other languages?