Reading Out of the "Idiot Box": Same-Language Subtitling on Television in India

Abstract

Same Language Subtitling (SLS) is the idea of subtitling the lyrics of songbased television programs (e.g., music videos), in the same language as the audio. Situated in a literature review of subtitling, this article describes the first-ever implementation of SLS on a TV program of film songs, specifically for first-language literacy. Chitrageet, a weekly 30-minute TV program of Gujarati film songs, was telecast across Gujarat state in India, with the lyrics subtitled in Gujarati. We discuss the results of the pilot study to test the effectiveness of SLS of film songs on the reading skills of out-of-school people. With limited exposure to SLS within a telecast period of 6 months, SLS was found to make an incremental but measurable contribution to decoding skills, across the group that generally saw the subtitled TV program (as compared to those who did not). Viewer testimonies further strengthen the case for SLS beyond quantifiable improvement, as a simple and economical idea for infusing everyday television entertainment with reading and writing (or scriptacy) transactions. The potential of SLS in India and other countries is enormous. The idea is especially powerful in popular culture for scriptacy skill improvement, motivation of nonscriptates, increasing viewers' exposure and interaction with print from early childhood, and increasing media access among the deaf. Copyright (c) 2005 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The folksong jukebox: singing along for social change in rural India

“…First, we found that a majority of children expressed preference for songs with the SLS feature over songs that did not provide it. This corroborates with prior findings on SLS wherein the audience expressed desire to view the lyrics simultaneously as they could follow the songs better (Kothari et al, 2004). Secondly, a higher percentage of children claimed to enjoy folk over the cinema CD-ROM.…”

“…In 2001, an agreement was made between Doordharshan, the national television station in India and IIM-A to apply subtitling on folksong programming recorded in-house. Results showed that even though film-song programs gained a higher viewership than folk-song programs, the folksong lyrics became more widely used and displayed openly by people in schools and homes (Kothari, Pandey & Chudgar, 2004). In fact, with little publicity, this folksong project raised about 50 per cent of the telecast and SLS expenses from advertising revenue.…”

Is subtitling equally effective everywhere? A first cross-national study on the reception of interlingually subtitled messages

“…This suggests that exposure can partly shape preferences. Indeed, using subtitles more would be advantageous especially for language learning and acquisition (Hassanabadi and Heidari 2014;Talaván and Rodríguez-Arancón 2014) and to fight illiteracy (Kothari and Bandyopadhyay 2014). Demonstrating that subtitling is effective is a good reason to promote it in countries less familiar with it, or to cater for the needs of vulnerable populations including sensorially disabled persons but also migrants and populations using languages of lesser diffusion.…”

Reading All The Way to Functional Literacy: Using Same Language Subtitling in Television Programmes in India

“…"Over 90% of viewers like SLS, not specifically because it gives them reading practice, but because it allows for singing along, knowing and writing down song lyrics, and clarifying words in songs that they were unsure of. Thus, reading improvement for most viewers is a subconscious process and a by-product of entertainment" (Kothari et al 2004: 23-44) [34].…”