Subtitling TV programs was a cultural act (translation)

http://www.kantele.org/p22.html
Everything in paranthesis was added by me. You can leave them out when correcting.

In the fall of last year (2002) MTV3 began the new season of "The Bold and the Beautiful" by broadcasting dubbed versions of the first six episodes. The tryout was made with a twinkle in the eyes (= not so serious), but the reception was all but understanding. There were numerous mocking articles and interviews in afternoon papers.

Subtitling for TV programs, which we feel is so secure and familiar, isn't as obvious a choice as one could think. There roams a story in the corridors of the Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE) that could be either true or just an urban legend. According to it, about the time when YLE took control of the television, it had become possible to make subtitles relatively cheap. The policymakers discussed if they should have subtitles or dubbing for foreign programs. They had to vote for it. The votes were three – three, the chairman's vote being the deciding one, and they ended up with subtitles.

This lucky descision has influenced the life of Finnish people more than we even notice. One of the explanations for the good English skills of the youth is that they have heard it almost three working years' worth before they come of age. The only popular Finnish TV program among over 9-ear-old children is "Salatut elämät" (a Finnish soap opera), all the others are broadcasted in English.

Subtitles have even bigger an influcence on the reading comprehension of Finns, which is one of the best in the world according to several research programs - PISA being the latest. The amazing thing is that there were no TV-related questions at all in the background variables.

Unfortunately, subtitles often get mentioned only once in a subsentence in any reading comprehension research. You can understand the value of subtitles the best if you compare them to reading books. There are 300 – 550 "screens" of text in a program that lasts an hour, each of which has an average of six words; so you read over 2000 words in an hour without even noticing. Young people watch subtitled programs for an average of ten hours in a week. That's equal to 20 books a year. Fifteen percents of high school girls and only three percents of high school boys say they read volunteerily over 20 books a year.

Subtitles are quite rare in the scope of Europe. Only eleven countries of the current and future EU countries use subtitles for adult-oriented programs and the other countries use dubbing. In reality they read even less subtitles, as they use subtitles in the Great Britain and in Ireland where only a few percents of TV programs aren't originally in English. In practice, eighty-seven percents of EU civilians watch TV that speaks. (Yeah, that sounds funny, but that's what it said in the original text, too, and it was funny also in Finnish.)

As a piquant detail it shall be mentioned that also a lawmaker has noticed the importance of subtitles.
Foreign TV prgorams and movies must be subtitles, dubbing is forbidden, according to the new language law of Estonia.

So do subtitles really have influence on reading comprehension? According to the data of the PISA research, reading comprehension of 15-year-old in the "subbing countries" is better than the average of OECD, and under that in those where dubbing is used. The difference is a quarter of the standard derivation.

The level of reading comprehension is of course affected by many other factors, starting from the culture and religion, ending with the education and the structure of the language. For example in Finland's case the almost perfect equivalence in voices and letters was totally ignored in the PISA research, although it definitely does make it easier to learn to read.

In Finland, subtitling affects in such way that the amount of people who can read poorly is exceptionally small. In the IEA research that was done in 1990 – 1993 they compared the reading comprehension skills of pupils in thirty-one countries, and Finns did excellent.
The most noticeable thing in the results was that for example that the weakest quarter of 14-year-old kids had higher points in understanding asiateksti than the weakest quarter of other countries, although our best quarter reached only the tenth place.

Regardless of the pros, subtitles aren't only a thing to be charmed about. Television and book jostle for people's spare time, and the television has been victorious in that contest. Reading books seems to remain as an indulgence of few.

The fifth of high school students who read the most read almost seventy percents more books than the rest four fifths altoghether.

If most of what you read is subtitles, it affects your fluency. Despite the remarkable amount of words, the speed of the subtitles is slow, only thirty to fifty words a minute. One of the reasons why the reading speed of high school students has unsettlingly detoriated is probably because the reading of books has decreased and the reading of subtitles has increased. At the moment there are four times more high school students who read slowly (less than 120 words/min) than twenty years ago.

Subtitles have a detoriating effect on the language because they are usually spoken language. Professor Pentti Leino wrote in his important article named "Fatherland and mother tongue" (Hiidenkivi 4/2002): "In theory, written language is as good as a foreign language for grade schoolers and also high schoolers." Unfortunately subtitles have connived this kind of progress.

Despite the disadvantages of subtitles, the pros are greater than them. If the story I told in the beginning is true, we should seriously consider pystyttäminen a statue for the unknown chairman of the meeting. That descision was the biggest cultural act that has been done in Finland after the war times.

Published in Helsingin Sanomat 12/28 2003