Our latest subtitle fail comes from regular reader Robert Mandara. He says: “You have to hand it to the BBC. Much as they let us down with their subtitling mistakes, sometimes they are hilarious.”
Robert sent us these screenshots from the BBC’s Eggheads series 13, episode 102 which he watched on iPlayer. As you can see, either this is a very alternative edition of Eggheads, or the subtitles are from a different episode of the show…
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Andy
January 30, 2013
Goodbye,
I’m Mario Ballotelli and I’m not commenting on this article.
Hello.
(comment provided by Red Bee Media)
Steven Logan
January 30, 2013
I watched that particular episode, I didn’t see that!!
bozothewondernerd
January 30, 2013
Episode 2 of the current Lewis series was broadcast with Episode 1’s subtitles … it went to what looked like live subtitling after about fifteen minutes.
iheartsubtitles
January 30, 2013
Is this from BBC iplayer? Interesting because I had a similar issue when trying to watch an episode of BBC Click but I had assumed that was due to the nature of it being a progamme subtitled live and was the horrible time lag, maybe BBC iplayer was suffering technical errors yesterday with a lot of its content? (Assuming you viewed this yesterday) …?
Although Red Bee Media supply the subtitles, it is the BBC who is reponsible for the workflow to get the correct subtitles to display to the correct episodes on iPlayer. (Red Bee are responsible for this aspect with linear TV broadcast but not the iPlayer application)
On a lighter note – hilarious subtitle fail!
Robert Mandara
January 31, 2013
Yes, this is from BBC iPlayer. They somehow transmitted the episode together with the previous episode’s subtitles. As you say, this is clearly a quality/workflow issue for which the subtitlers are not to blame.
I wish iPlayer would have a button to click if subtitles are not working properly (to tell someone to check/fix them) and, perhaps, a slider so that we could drag subtitles into synchronisation with the picture. Where subtitles have been modified after the programme has first appeared on iPlayer, it would be helpful to indicate this in the programme information.
iheartsubtitles
January 31, 2013
I think this is a really good idea, why not suggest it to BBC iPlayer?