International Captioning Project
Asia and Australia
| Country | Standard | TV households | Cable | VCR |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Australia | PAL | 5,000,000 | N/A | 79% |
| China | PAL-D | 212,000,000 | 9% | 44% |
| Hong Kong | PAL-I | 1,650,000 | 3% | 81% |
| India | PAL | 35,000,000 | 10% | 17% |
| Japan | NTSC | 43,000,000 | 20% | 83.5% |
| Korea | NTSC | 11,000,000 | 1% | 67% |
| Singapore | PAL | 720,000 | 2% | 84% |
| Taiwan | NTSC | 5,000,000 | 53% | 61% |
Amount of Subtitling
Throughout Asia, the teletext service (WST standard) is used to provide news, weather, sports and other information to viewers. However, there is very little subtitling for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers. Australia is the leader: the non-profit Australian Caption Centre provides approximately 25 hours of subtitling per week.
In Hong Kong, the government is creating working groups to study ways to make programs broadcast there accessible to deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers. Currently, there is very little subtitling in Hong Kong: TVB, the Chinese-language channel, and Asia TV (ATV) both provide open subtitling for approximately 10% of their programming; and Wharf Cable provides approximately 15 hours a week for its programming. ATV also provides about an hour a week of sign-language interpreted programming.
Japan passed a law in 1993 which would make it possible for television stations and producers to receive half of the production costs of captioned programs from the government. Currently, there are approximately 15 hours per week of captioning available in Japan.
It is becoming more common in Japan for programs imported from the U.S. to retain their line-21 English captions. Programs such as the MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour are delivered to Japan with the captions intact. One Japanese electronics manufacturer, Sanyo, is selling a set-top decoder in Japan called "The English Teacher." This decoder has an expanded character mask which the viewer can manipulate to cover the Japanese subtitles, over which the English captions are placed, thereby allowing the viewer to read the English captions while listening to the English dialogue.
Multi-lingual Captioning
In Pune, India, the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) has created a system called Language Independent Program Subtitles, or LIPS. According to the manufacturer, the PC-based LIPS is capable of creating subtitles in as many as 50 different languages, including all romance languages, all Indian dialects, Perso-Arabic, Russian, Sinhalese and Tibetan. The subtitle data, based on the EBU standard using a special format designed by CDAC, are encoded into the VBI on a copy of the master videotape and transmitted along with the regular program audio and video. Using a special LIPS Receiver, the viewer may choose which of the available languages to decode.
A Canadian-based teletext and videotext hardware company, Norpak, has been experimenting with and promoting the idea of increasing the data rate of line-21 style data. This increased data rate would effectively allow more complex characters, such as those found in languages using non-Latin alphabets, to be transmitted in the VBI, thus allowing for closed captioning in Asian (and other) languages which would remain recordable on home VCRs.
The idea of providing multi-lingual broadcasts to Asia is extremely attractive. Large countries like China are in need of programming which can address a multitude of dialects simultaneously. European and American program providers are looking for ways to provide their services to the Asian mainland, where they may need to provide feeds in the many dialects of Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai or other languages simultaneously. Moreover, the desire of these populations to learn English, and the strong, growing evidence that captions are useful for improving language skills, are further reasons to investigate this market.
