Captions shouldn't be censored. If the video says fuck or cum or cunt the captions should say the fucking word.
Unless it's a slur! No one needs to see that.
If they say a slur in the video, the captions should reflect it. The disabled are not little babies who have to have life sanitized for them.
okay but I feel like ur forgetting that slurs don't just apply to the disabled... children don't need to be seeing the n-word or other racial slurs??
but children DO need to be hearing it? are you actually reading the post here?
Here's how it works when subtitles are done properly:
Audio: Let's BEEP go! Subtitle: Let's (censor tone) go!
Audio: Let's fucking go! Subtitle: Let's fucking go!
Removing swears and slurs from the subtitles without removing it from the audio is implying that deaf/HoH people need babying, unlike their hearing friends and family sitting right next to them. Which is frustrating.
The point of subtitles is to give the same experience to everyone watching, regardless of ability—not to be a more palatable version of what's being said.
The purpose of subtitles/captions is to be accurate, that's all.
I did caption editing for awhile.
The company policy was to include all words in the audio whenever we could hear them, period. If the project was designated a "clean read" file instead of verbatim, we were allowed to omit excessive instances of non-essential word filler ("um," "like," etc). But there were NO situations where we censored/omitted offensive language on our own initiative if we could hear the word to transcribe (a client could request censoring/omission, but that never happened to me, not even once).
I sometimes even told QA to recheck something if I was in doubt about a word due to accent, sound quality, etc and this kind of thing was treated with the same seriousness as any other request. It didn't matter if it was a slur or swear or whatever. If you could hear it, you included it in the transcript.
Their point was to include as much information as possible from the audio, period. There were also detailed rules about describing sound effects - so yes, it was totally conceivable that you might need to type out words for bodily functions. It's just part of the work.
The only time we censored a transcript was if the audio actually had a censor noise/deletion that obscured a word.
