International Captioning Project
Short-term
Recommendations
A partial solution to the problem of providing access for all viewers can be easily achieved in the short term. Existing technologies should be tested in a real-world satellite delivery and downlink environment like the Heartland project. Developing multi-lingual captioning capability is an effort already well underway at The Caption Center at WGBH, and both Heartland and NCAM are open to the possibility of such a test. Additionally:
- The hardware and software currently exist to create a multi-lingual captioned or subtitled broadcast. An international demonstration project should be conducted to test and promote their use for efficient, simultaneous transmission and decoding of closed captions or subtitles in multiple languages.
- The Heartland Project should be explored as a partner in a test of a real-world application of the current technology. Transponder capacity is expensive and difficult to obtain; multi-lingual captioning and subtitling would allow a single satellite feed to carry the subtitled version of a program for multiple countries and languages.
Ultimately, technology should allow caption and subtitle providers to encode data in many languages onto a single program, and allow the viewer to selectively choose which language to view, or even have the option of choosing a dubbed soundtrack instead of captions or subtitles. Progress has already been made in this direction: from programs which are encoded with multi-lingual captions, program distributors can choose, at the head end or downlink site, one data stream and make those captions instantly available to viewers through open captions or subtitles. This technical capability should be further tested and put into use, and would be useful for developing countries which wonÕt have the ability to provide a more complex service in the near future.
A related study would be to determine the feasibility of encoding closed multi-lingual captions or subtitles at the local level, thus giving the local broadcaster complete control over which languages are most useful for the region. One scenario, for example, would be to transmit multi-lingual captions alongside, rather than already encoded within, program video during a satellite feed. The local broadcaster would record the video and data independently, choose which languages are appropriate to the broadcast area and then encode those languages prior to broadcast, or even at the time of the broadcast itself. Facilities which lack the technology to downlink satellite transmissions could receive caption data via telephone line or even diskette.
