legends · 4 min read ·
The Subtitler
A live-caption operator sees captions appear on her screen that she did not speak.
Live subtitling is a craft of omission. You listen, you speak what you hear into a recogniser that has been trained on your voice, and a few seconds later the words appear at the bottom of the screen. It takes about four years to learn. You must be fast, accurate, and neutral. You must never, ever, add.
I was the overnight respeaker for the regional news service for eleven years. My studio was a booth the size of a wardrobe, with a headset and two monitors, and a window that looked onto a corridor. On one monitor, the live feed. On the other, the caption editor.
The night it started, I was doing a late bulletin. The presenter was a woman named Carys Webb, a very good one, steady and warm. The studio gallery on screen was familiar to me from four thousand hours of watching it. I spoke along with her, a half-second behind, calm as a man reading a shopping list.
*CARYS: Police have appealed for witnesses after a collision on the A-road near Marden on Tuesday evening.*
I said it back. The words came up on the screen.
*CARYS: Anyone with dashcam footage is asked to contact officers.*
I said it. The subtitle appeared, a clean white line on a black strip.
Then the line that I didn't say.
I had said nothing. My mouth was shut. I was drinking from a paper cup. But the caption on the monitor read, in my usual typeface:
*[WHISPERING] She can hear us.*
I put the cup down. I looked at the editor, expecting an error, a stray macro, a wrong phrase from the dictionary. The caption disappeared after its usual two seconds. The bulletin went on. I carried on speaking, my hands cold.
I reported it afterwards to the technical manager, a man named Idris, who ran a diagnostic and found nothing. He said it was a ghost of the recogniser. It does that, he said. It picks up the room tone and invents words. I wanted to believe him. I have kept the logs.
*03/11 23:14 — Caption: [WHISPERING] She can hear us. Source: none.*
*05/11 23:21 — Caption: Don't say the next line. Source: none.*
*06/11 23:09 — Caption: [LAUGHTER] Source: none.*
*08/11 23:30 — Caption: Carys, behind you. Source: none.*
On the eighth I did what you must never do. I said the caption aloud. Not into the recogniser. Into the room. "Carys, behind you." My voice, in the booth, tiny and hoarse.
On the screen, in the studio, Carys Webb, mid-sentence, paused. A tiny hitch in the delivery that only someone who had watched her for eleven years would have noticed. She did not turn. She looked into the camera for one beat longer than she should, her eyes flicking to the left, to the corner of the lens where my caption would appear.
Then she went on with the weather.
I have thought a great deal about that second. It is not possible that she read it. The captions are broadcast on a separate data stream, for viewers who select them, and the presenter's autocue does not show them. And yet there was something in her face, a flick, an awareness.
I went home. I slept badly. In the morning, my sister rang to say she had seen me on television.
"I wasn't on," I said. "I do the subtitles."
"I know," she said. "That's what's odd. At the end of the late bulletin. There was a caption in the corner. It said, *Goodnight, Rhian. Thank you for listening.* And then your name. And then what looked like a little photograph of you, in the booth, with your headset on."
I asked her what time. She said 23:40. I was home by then. I was sitting in my car in the drive with the engine off.
I resigned the next week. I told them it was my eyes. The booth is closed now, and they use an automatic system, a machine that does the whole thing without a person, and which nobody has ever heard whisper.
But I turned on the television last night, for the news, with the captions on, as I do for the sound. And near the end, in a small grey strip at the bottom of the screen, a line that had no business being there came up and sat for two seconds and went away.
*Rhian is the last one who can hear us. Please keep your voice low.*
I turned the sound off, and I have not turned it on since.