ABSTRACT
Respeaking, as implemented firstly by VRT (Belgium) and the BBC (UK) in 2001, was conceived as a method to produce real-time subtitles, which are a specific type of subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing (SDH) used for live programmes. The origins of SDH were very different in the US and in Europe. In Europe, the beginning of SDH is inextricably linked with television, the teletext and more specifically with the BBC, which announced its Ceefax Teletext service in 1972 and started providing SDH in 1979. In Europe, the first experiments regarding live subtitling were conducted in the UK and Flanders. Live subtitling is, according to the European Broadcasting Union, the most ambitious type of subtitling, where “the live subtitler seeks to understand the context of the programme in advance” and then, on transmission, “creates the subtitles in real-time”.
