A couple of subtitles questions

1) Since when has IMS done subtitles for five? Didn't ITFC used to do subtitles for them?

2) Why are some commercials being subtitled in Australia? The reason I'm asking that is because the sound effects are being described in lower case as opposed to all caps.

Red Bee - who handle quite a lot of subtitling in the UK (as they took over the BBC in-house subtitling dept I believe?) - are owned by an Australian bank, who also had Australian interests. As a result I believe Red Bee now have an Aussie subtitling operation as well, so some stuff may be done over there.

I heard rumours that some UK live subtitling was now being done this way, with viewing quality feeds sent to Aus for them to watch and listen to? AIUI UK live subtitling can now often be done from home with subtitlers watching off-air and sending the results back via internet.

Now it is so easy to send viewing quality copies of stuff over the internet - it doesn't matter where people are physically these days (apart from local spelling issues...)

saw somebody doing that with voiceovers in the US, the tv company ran the tape and the continuity anouncer watched it from home over the internet and recorded his piece

I'm pretty sure they're subitlted because the advertisers/advertising agency asks them to be - some are, some aren't.

Macquarie Bank owns Red Bee, which in turn owns the Australian Caption Centre. Looking at their website (http://www.auscap.com.au/) it appears that they're sponsored by Toyota which would explain why all Toyota's ads are captioned. It's not a completely unheard of thing - the CBC in Canada has a 100% captioning requirement, which includes ads (see here: http://joeclark.org/access/captioning/), and I'm sure there are some others too.

ACC handle most of the subtitling I think, I know that Austext (the only teletext service) is owned by the Seven Network, and that SBS (the multicultural public broadcaster) do a lot of captioning (as in foreign-language stuff with captions that translate it) - one of the largest in the world, in fact. Whether or not they actually do teletext subtitling is another thing, although I'm pretty sure that whenever I have seen credits they have been for the ACC.

There's more on subtitling advertisments (which they actually call Supertext) on their website: http://www.auscap.com.au/client/c.aspx?id=25

Yep, I've seen that too. He was a voice over artiste for trails rather than continuity and he didn't get to see the trail, just hear the audio.

The more popular voice overs have similar setups, very useful when a radio station wants just a couple of liners done.

There was an srticle in Ariel (BBC staff magazine) a few years ago about a live subtitler who subtitled News 24 from her house overlooking the Forth Estuary. Her and another subtitler somewhere else in the country would alternate half hours, using the other half hours for preparing

I watched part of last Monday's Panorama with the subtitles on and was surprised at how bad the "live" subtitling was, compared to that done in advance.

There were frequent references to "council", "the council" and "council tax". On every occasion the subtitles said "cancer", "the cancer" and "cancer tax".

I'd have expected them to get it right after the first two or three instances, but they didn't. Don't they ever think about the context? Getting the first two wrong, I could understand up to a point, but surely not on "cancer tax".

Well you lot dahn sarf do tend to let your vowels slip rather badly, to the point where council (caaarnsoo) does sound rather like cancer (caaainsaa).

If the setup is in another country this kind of thing is inevitable really.

Why exactly does it have to be outsourced though?

I'd like to add another question. Why does Red Bee do subtitles for some of the music videos seen on Emap-owned channels?

When the BBC sold off BBC Broadcast (which became Red Bee) the deal included a non-competition clause which doesn't let the BBC do any of the functions that Red Bee's perform themselves for a number of years

Presumably that had suitable clauses to allow the nations to do their own continuity?