Language Control in Captioned Films

For many years, the only source of educational captioned media was the Captioned Films for the Deaf program. Captions were written by teachers at summer workshops, of two or more weeks duration, which were usually held on the campus of a residential school for the deaf. This 1977 paper provided guidelines to caption writers as to caption length and vocabulary (language was often heavily edited). For each film, it was determined which of three levels of captioning would be followed, ranging from very simple sentence patterns with no compound sentences to those with complex sentences.

Tags: history, captioning, manuals-and-guidelines