Closed captions are a text track that can be turned on or off by the viewer, and that transcribes dialogue while also identifying non-speech audio such as sound effects, speaker changes, and music. In localization and media accessibility work, they are treated as a separate deliverable from subtitles because they serve deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers rather than only translating foreign-language dialogue.
Closed captions appear in broadcast, streaming, and corporate video projects as separate deliverable files or caption tracks. Localization teams create them from templates or transcripts, often using captioning guidelines for line breaks, reading speed, and sound labels, then run QA in a caption editor or media player. They are often delivered as SRT or platform-specific caption files.
A frequent mistake is treating closed captions as plain subtitle translation and omitting non-speech cues such as [door slams] or [phone rings]. That removes essential context for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers and can make the content inaccessible. Another error is exceeding on-screen reading limits, which causes captions to disappear too quickly.
For creative and consumer content the failure mode is flatness, not inaccuracy — and flatness passes an accuracy check. Terms here also carry technical constraints (reading speed, character budgets) that are part of the brief.
Angel Translation locks terms like this into a project terminology base before expert review begins, so the same source term resolves to the same target term across every document in a submission — and stays consistent in the next revision. See the 8-step AI + expert workflow.
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