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What’s the difference between captions and subtitles?

What’s the difference between captions and subtitles?

In everyday life, the words ‘captions’ and ‘subtitles’ are often used interchangeably. At Stagetext we distinguish between three different types of captions and subtitles, because they are produced in different ways.

  • Theatre captioning is for scripted performance – prepared and cued live by a theatre captioner
  • Live subtitling is for unscripted speech – produced live by a speech-to-text reporter
  • Digital subtitling is for pre-recorded videos – prepared by a digital subtitler

Whatever you call them, captions and subtitles are the verbatim, accessible text that allows deaf, deafened and hard of hearing people to be included.

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