International Captioning Project
South America (major
countries)
| Country | Standard | TV households | Cable | VCR |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Argentina | PAL-N | 10,000,000 | 39% | 31% |
| Bolivia | NTSC | N/A | N/A | .7% |
| Brazil | PAL-M | 39,000,000 | N/A | 11% |
| Chile | NTSC | 6,000,000 | 2% | 12% |
| Colombia | NTSC | 6,000,000 | 4% | 18% |
| Ecuador | NTSC | 620,000 | 2% | 16% |
| Paraguay | PAL-N | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Peru | NTSC | 2,000,000 | N/A | 31% |
| Uruguay | PAL-N | 600,000 | N/A | 17% |
| Venezuela | NTSC | 3,000,000 | 2% | 24% |
Amount of Subtitling
There is currently no subtitling in South America. However, Brazil appears to be making efforts to bring such a service to its deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers. Most foreign programs broadcast in Brazil are dubbed in Portuguese. One electronics engineer there has devised a special decoder which uses dual-language, line-21 caption decoder technology, and also makes use of the second audio program (SAP). One proposal for captioning in Brazil uses both captioning channels (CC1 and CC2), and both the normal audio channels plus the SAP channel. English captions would be encoded on CC1, Portuguese on CC2; the original English soundtrack would be broadcast on the SAP channel and Portuguese on the regular audio channels, thereby giving viewers a variety of listen- and/or read-along options.
However, Latin America is one of the fastest growing television markets in the world. With an increasing number of television options come an increasing number of technical capabilities. Multi-lingual captioning for Latin America is possible with the existing line-21 captioning system. With the investment by American cable companies and broadcasters in Latin ventures, line-21 type open or closed captioning in Spanish and Portuguese could soon be a reality. In fact, Turner Entertainment Networks have already used open line-21 captions to subtitle classic movies destined for their Latin American service, TNT South.
