1964 September, “New Books: The History of Railways. By Erwin Berghaus.Barrie & Rockcliff. 35s.”, inModern Railways, page222:
Some of the photographs are new and interesting, but manycaptions are amateurish, uninformative or simply careless.
(cinematography,television) A piece of text appearing on screen as asubtitle or other part of a film or broadcast, describing dialogue (and sometimes other sound) for viewers who cannot hear.
(theater, performance production) By analogy, text in a similar system used in a performance venue for transcription of a live event.
(law) The section on an official paper (for example, as part of aseizure orcapture) that describes when, where, and what was taken, found or executed, and who authorized the act.
In live or recorded audiovisual performance,captions is an umbrella term forclosed captions (abbreviatedCC) andopen captions.Closed captions are visible only to the intended users: on television, via a decoding device, setting, or software; in cinema or performance venues, via a captioning device provided at certain seats or visible using special glasses.Open captions are visible to everyone watching—in many opera houses, for example, there aresurtitles (also calledsupertitles) projected above the stage or on devices at each seat showing the libretto, often translated into the local language. Some countries require educational or government/public-service television programs to be open-captioned for the benefit of the deaf, hard of hearing, developmentally disabled, or people learning the local language.
In film and video,captions maytranscribe or describe all dialogue and significant sounds for viewers who cannot hear it, whilesubtitlestranslate foreign-language dialogue. This distinction is sometimes made using the termsubtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing(SDH), which corresponds to(closed/open) captions, while the general termsubtitles is reserved for onscreen transcription intended for the use of a hearing audience. For instance, SDH or captions may include annotations such as(sirens) (to describe a sound) or(angrily) (to describe a tone of voice), where subtitles do not, on the assumption that the subtitle users can hear the sound or tone of voice.
In Internetcaptions, the length of the text can very from that of aflash fiction, to a fullshort story.
