While accepting the Golden Globe for Best International Feature Film in 2019, Parasite director Bong Joon-ho famously said, “Once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.” A few weeks later, the director would go on to accept the Oscar for Best Picture, the first time in the history of the Academy that a non-English-language film took the ceremony’s main prize. 

Subtitles are not new to cinema. During its infancy, in fact, the realm of moving pictures heavily relied on subtitles because film was born as a silent art, only evolving into talkies in 1927. Between Alan Crosland’s The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length film with a synchronized music score, singing and speech, and Louis Le Prince’s 1888 Roundhay Garden Scene, widely considered to be the first film ever made, stand 39 years of sprawling productions that made title cards an art on its own. 

Still, somewhere along English-speaking cinema’s evolution, subtitles became ostracized. American audiences in particular proved quite resistant to subtitled films. “In this country, subtitles are a foreign film’s worst enemy, the one thing sure to doom a movie to a tiny art house,” Judith Shulevitz wrote in The New York Times in a 1992 article about audiences’ objection to text on screen. According to several studies, in many non-English-speaking countries, subtitles take second place to dubbing in usage, with huge markets like Spain, Japan, Germany and France often opting for the latter. 

Shulevitz concludes her article by stating that “as the world grows smaller and film productions grow increasingly international, subtitles may become less common.” Yet, the year that Parasite won Best Picture, Netflix published a study stating approximately 80 percent of its viewership consumed subtitled content, with the US viewing of non-English titles increasing by 33 percent in two years. 

Slowly, then all at once, articles on the sudden popularity of subtitles began to pop up everywhere, with renowned media vehicles publishing in-depth pieces on the increased consumption of subtitled content, particularly by younger audiences. The quizzical Stranger Things descriptive subtitles were all the rage on social media, with a frame of the Demogorgon and the descriptor ‘[tentacles squelching wetly]’ spearheading the meme-a-thon. 

How real is the Parasite effect? “For a long time, a lot of content was created in English, so in English-speaking countries, there was no culture—or need—for subtitles. I have the impression the big change came when Parasite won the Oscar,” says Castillian Spanish subtitler Aida López Estudillo, who works with streamers such as Netflix, when asked if she has noticed an increase in demand for subtitling services in recent years. 

This is a sentiment echoed by Sophia Klippvik, Marketing Manager at LinQ, a localization company specializing in subtitles that provides services for Disney+ and several other major streaming platforms. “The demand has grown quite a lot,” she affirms, noting that people have become hungrier for foreign content after the success of Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winning film and the Korean phenomenon of Squid Game. According to Klippvik, the Covid-19 pandemic seems to have been the driving force behind this sudden change, as people found themselves with more time available and fewer resources for other entertainment options.

The pandemic seems to have further accentuated a pattern of subtitle consumption that was first highlighted in 2019, with the global lockdowns forcing film festivals and other media events to pivot to online platforms, a medium that allowed for festivals to increase their subtitle provision. Sean Welsh, a subtitler for Matchbox Cine, worried that the trend would soon disappear after festivals returned to their physical form. “I was worried it wasn’t going to continue, but a lot of times it has continued. What it means is that more general audiences are seeing descriptive subtitles by default and general audiences are much more comfortable with descriptive subtitles.”

Perhaps out of all high-profile festivals to make considerable efforts to increase subtitled content, Sundance remains the standout. Starting in 2021, the festival began to demand all projects submitted for consideration have subtitles available for online and in-person screenings. The measure, the festival said, came as part of “an ongoing commitment to accessibility.”

“I think exposure is the best tool to help increase commonality with access,” says Laura Benge, Accessibility Manager at the Sundance Institute. “We provide image descriptions on our website, we want to have a very visible demonstration of what others can be looking for in their own content. And we continue to grow with that because I think that one of the biggest barriers to people being comfortable with something is just that it’s not familiar to them.”

The same year that the festival experienced a jury walkout due to accessibility concerns, Sundance had several titles broaching issues of accessibility and inclusion in its program, including Alison O’Daniel’s The Tuba Thieves. O’Daniel, who is Deaf, drew upon her own experiences with hearing loss to craft the film, a blend of documentary and fiction following a series of mysterious tuba robberies in Los Angeles. The Tuba Thieves is described by the filmmaker as a film “about listening, but not tethered to the ear. It is a film about Deaf gain, hearing loss and the perception of sound in Los Angeles—by animals, plants and humans.”

“One of the things I noticed is this real stress about getting it right. If you can’t get it right, then it’s too much work, so you shouldn’t do it at all,” O’Daniel said when commenting on the barriers to providing access at festivals and events. “That seems to be the space where we’ve been in for so long and I get it, because if they do a half-assed job, then they’re probably going to get shamed by people with disabilities who are tired and angry,” she continued, speaking to the recurrent frustrations faced by people with access needs, who are often excluded from major film festivals, be it as professionals or attendees.

O’Daniel also remarks that there is no need to try and do “everything right,” as there is no one way to be fully accessible—what includes one portion of the audience, might exclude another, but what can’t continue to happen is for festivals to treat inclusion as a “ticking-box exercise.”

Commenting on the barriers that she commonly faces when attending screenings at festivals—and public screenings in general—as a Deaf person, O’Daniel was quick to highlight one obstacle: the CaptiView. This is the device that malfunctioned during the premiere of Magazine Dreams, and it consists of a small screen attached to a malleable arm, ending in a clasp that fits a cup holder. Using wireless frequencies to transmit captions straight to the device, CaptiView places the onus on the user to adjust the device for comfort.

“At Sundance, I used [the CaptiView] and the woman sitting next to me was so rude because I kept switching seats to figure out where was the best place for the device. I ended up having to push the device really far down, to the point where it was falling off the cup and so I had to hold it and my arm fell asleep the whole time. I eventually gave up and after that experience decided I’m never using one again, which means I’m not seeing movies in theaters unless they’re foreign-language films,” O’Daniel tells of one of many frustrating experiences with the device, lamenting the loss of a communal experience cherished by her and many others.

Non-US readers might be learning about the CaptiView for the very first time through this article, as the device is most commonly used in the United States (I, who live in the UK, had not heard of it beforehand), but deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences in other countries face an array of different challenges when attempting to access screenings labeled as accessible. 

The UK-based accessibility consultant Charlie Little is an outspoken advocate for increased offerings of captioned screenings and has often had to leave screenings due to issues with the provision of descriptive subtitles. “I’ve been to films when I almost walked out because I thought they didn’t have descriptive subtitles but there was just a lot that wasn’t being represented in the descriptions,” Little says. “And that can really take you out of the experience as well because you are missing out on so much.”

Despite not being a recent problem, people within the industry note that the concerns around automation increased exponentially with a big leap in clients inquiring about automated options, which is a costlier, lengthier process, instead of working with subtitlers. “You have to do a lot of background research. That’s when machine translation becomes an issue. You have to make sure you respect the culture of the country and ensure that the context fits whenever there is an idiom or a pun. Learning those nuances, like foul language, takes a long time,” Klippvik says. 

“The machine just translates words, it doesn’t translate intentions,” López Estudillo points out. “It understands nothing of formalities and, because it’s a machine, it doesn’t know gender and it understands the nuances of gender even less. Everyone keeps saying we hate technology and that’s not true. We don’t hate technology, we love technology. We work with technology every day. This is not technology. Maybe there will be a time when something actually works, like when they cross it with facial recognition or something of the sort, but, now? It really doesn’t work.”

López Estudillo’s point is echoed by many of the experts consulted for this piece, and even more so by audiences directly affected by the poor quality of subtitles. Although there is a general understanding from many that content (that dreaded little word), especially online content on social-media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, has become more accessible due to the wonders of automated subtitling, what it often creates is a tricky simulacrum, with the establishment of a belief that captioned content is readily and widely available—and therefore, accessibility conversations around captioning are no longer viewed as urgent—when the truth is much murkier and the conversation around it is as pressing as it ever was, perhaps even more. 

What the perceived increase in subtitled content, and the conversation around it, also speaks to, is the notion that certain topics only reach a mainstream status when adopted by people with certain privileges—in this case, hearing/non-disabled people. “One thing that’s quite upsetting is that Deaf and disabled people have been shouting about this for years and sent to the sidelines, and then every now and then I see a viral tweet by a non-disabled or hearing person talking about subtitles and it gets millions of likes,” Charlie Little says, concerning the issue of who gets heard. “Of course, I want solidarity and for non-disabled people to be vocal, but it is equally frustrating because [when] I see Deaf and disabled advocates saying the exact same thing—in a much more informed and articulate way—it doesn’t get any traction whatsoever.”

“It was a bittersweet moment when I went to my first captioned screening because it was the first time I felt part of this communal experience but I was also incredibly sad it took me that long to experience that,” Little says of the feeling that they experienced when attending their first captioned screening, aged seventeen. “With the pandemic and seeing a mainstream consumption of subtitles, it’s brilliant, but why did it not get prioritized until hearing people benefited from that as well? It’s heartbreaking and it can be very bittersweet.”

An investigation by The Week on Netflix’s “subtitle problem” shared one glaring translation mishap brought up by Youngmi, in which a subtitle read ‘I’m not a genius, but I still got it worked out’ when it should read ‘I am very smart; I just never got a chance to study.’ On the importance of this specific mistake, the article said, “The original invokes a common trope in Korean cinema, a smart but uneducated character, and ‘the writers, all they want you to know about her is that,’ Youngmi said. ‘[It] seems so small, but it’s the entire character’s purpose of being in the show.’ ” The translation misses it entirely.

When asked about the Squid Game case, López Estudillo explained that the mistakes could have been a consequence of a common practice within subtitling: using English as the pivot language for all translations, which means that all text to be subtitled first gets translated into English and then retranslated into the language used for captioning. She says that, while the practice might make sense for dialects where there is a scarcity of subtitlers who are native speakers, it doesn’t make sense for more widely spoken languages such as French, Japanese or Spanish. 

“There’s this big industry resistance,” López Estudillo says, when asked why this is still standard practice. “Ideally, what happens is that the translator will have knowledge of the original language. So if I get a film in French, I will translate from the audio, so even if the English template has mistakes, I will probably hear most of them. Theoretically, I don’t have to do that. I could follow my English template and still be doing my job.”

Who does the translating, and for which audiences? Is it ever possible to accurately translate the intended meaning given the contextual, linguistic and regional specificities often contained in a single word? These are big questions, for another essay, but they point to an overarching one.  

Who are the creative caretakers? who is in charge of the procedural nitty-gritty when it comes to descriptive subtitles and creative captioning? As more and more streamers and exhibitors pivot to subtitled content and content with descriptive subtitles, professionals within the captioning industry are left to navigate a lack of widely established guidelines. Although there are recommendations in place, especially for descriptive subtitles, practitioners often work on their own frames for best practice—or respond to certain recommendations offered by clients. 

“Your agency might say ‘add all sounds’ or ‘add only obvious sounds’,” remarks López Estudillo. “If you see a door slam, you don’t need the caption ‘[door slamming]’ because the hard of hearing can see and you don’t want to assume the viewer doesn’t understand a door slamming. For example, you would never write the name of the person speaking if that person is on the screen.”

According to most professionals, the only imperative rule is to not pass judgment through the making of descriptive subtitles as they are a practical device concocted to be objective. “You don’t want to make judgments on descriptive subtitles, such as ‘[wacky music]’ or ‘[sleazy guy laughs]’,” Sean Welsh says. “And you don’t want to be infantilizing. If you ever see an exclamation mark in a descriptive caption, that’s a red flag, because it doesn’t need to be there. That is childish thinking.”

Going the opposite direction of objectivity is a practice that goes by many names but is most commonly known as creative captioning. This specific form of captioning sees subtitles as artistically integral to the art that they are embedded in. “There’s an ambiguity of terminology because creative captioning is used by a lot of Deaf practitioners to talk about the way they caption their films,” Welsh clarifies when commenting on the challenges to accessibility presented by certain forms of creative captioning. It’s a sentiment echoed by Charlie Little, who says they have “issues” with creative captioning as it can place “aesthetics over access.”

“That’s not to say it doesn’t work, but I think it can be just as inaccessible and it can be distracting to a lot of people,” Little continues. “Some people like to treat access as something with its own creative value and I think subtitles can be creative and match the tone and atmosphere of the film through adjective use and descriptive labels—that’s where I see creativity coming through.”

To caption The Tuba Thieves, O’Daniel worked with a series of Deaf and hard-of-hearing collaborators. Of the practicalities of the process, the director says that she only asked people working with her to “keep captions around the same length of time on screen as the sound is taking place, and trust everything you’ve always wanted captions to do as your guide, things they’ve never done and you’ve been missing.” O’Daniel believes this freedom—and ongoing dialogue—are the reasons why the captioning in her film succeeds in being part of the film itself, not a mere addendum. 

“The point about terminology is that there is a lot of confusion and ambiguity which leads to access being interrupted,” says Sean Welsh of the murkiness that permeates subtitling nomenclature. This is why, he says, it is essential for those in the industry to share information with one another and act as advocates for clear communication with fellow professionals and general audiences. It was out of this desire to share acquired knowledge that Sean and his colleagues at Matchbox Cine launched Sidecard, a searchable database cataloging available access materials for films in the UK. 

“I think there’s a lot of opportunity for all sides to take some responsibility for accessibility across the industry,” echoes Laura Benge. “I know that many film festivals are working together to provide shared resources and information. A lot of us are nonprofits with very limited resources. So anytime we can share with each other, it drives an entire industry forward so that not everybody has to reinvent the wheel.”

Once again, although there is a generalized perception that the need for subtitles is no longer urgent due to the increase in subtitled content across online platforms, there are still many barriers not only to subtitled content online but—and perhaps at a more pressing level—within theatrical exhibition. In order for change to be concrete and widespread, both Benge and Welsh agree that leading voices in the industry need to push for accessibility as a standard, not a special offering. 

“As some people start making decisions, they become spear hunters. Realistically, in order for everybody to create an accessible industry, you need people to step out, try something, see if it works and, if it doesn’t work, then step back to the drawing board and work with the disability community to figure out an alternative way,” says Benge. 

Welsh is firmer in his stance that people who hold power to decide what gets screened and in which format need to pave the way forward: “Ultimately, you need a programmer who just says, ‘I’m sorry, but we are not going to screen your film because we want our program to be 100 percent accessible.’ Again, there are real-world ramifications with that, but ultimately it is the last step in that conversation.”