Executive VP Brenna is here today to talk to you about closed captions!

Last month, whilst reviewing a draft of upcoming questions, I was struck by the suggestion that we shouldn’t accept “subtitles” as an alternative answer for this question:

“Prior to the Television Decoder Circuitry Act of 1990, a separate box, made only by Sanyo, was required to display something on your TV screen. What did that box display?”

The answer is “closed captioning,” and my first thought was, “yeah, what’s the big diff?”

But, having recently enjoyed the great captioning work on “Stranger Things” Season 4, I decided to investigate.

Turns out, there is a big diff – closed captioning transcribes all sound elements, not just speech. In 1947, Emerson Romero, a Deaf silent film actor and cousin of movie star Cesar Romero, developed the first captioning of a “talkie” by putting captions between picture frames. In the following decade, a Belgian process for etching captions onto the film led a New England school to caption a small set of movies, before a 1958 act of Congress created the Captioned Films for the Deaf agency. Dr. Malcolm J. Norwood joined the staff in 1962, and became known as the “Father of Closed Captioning,” due to his role in advocating for and popularizing caption decoders for television.

Subtitles are basically timed transcriptions, either to translate (e.g., the characters are suddenly speaking in Italian) or clarify, as on many web videos. These more properly originated from the “intertitles” of silent films, which provided the dialogue that couldn’t be communicated in the action.

Additionally, there is also open captioning. This is the same type of captioning info as in closed captions, but the file is embedded with the video. With closed captioning, it’s a separate file from the video, so you can turn it on and off – and would require the use of a separate device. Now, we can select it in the settings of almost any video we watch on any platform, whether we are native speakers, hard of hearing, or just trying not to wake up the kids while we watch monsters from the Upside Down squelch wetly across the screen.