Subtitles

A. wrote in “a changing life” on 21 August about going to see a film entitled La Vie en Rose which turned out to be a French film with English subtitles about the life of Edith Piaf. Now, she is bilingual and certainly didn’t need the subtitles.

However this recalled to my mind an event on holiday this year, when I went to the Highlands of Scotland, during which I visited Castle Urquhart on Loch Ness. The castle itself is a ruin, but up away from the water is a Visitors’ Centre, where you could see a film of the history of the castle with re-enactments of the significant events. This film had subtitles in French and German. Now I am rather deaf and so it is somewhat ironic that I found it easier to follow the French subtitles than the spoken commentary!

I mentioned this to one of the staff and they said that, in fact, it would be quite easy to add English subtitles too.

I do, in fact, have quite a bit of difficulty in hearing now, so much so that I gave up watching the television quite some ago – partly because there were so few good or interesting programmes on but also because those that I liked tended to have rapid fire speech so that I became lost. Now, I know that you can see subtitles on television programmes but these seem to be of rather a poor quality.

I tend (when not otherwise occupied) to watch DVDs with English subtitles and even managed to convince the television licensing people that I really did not watch television at all.