

You'll also often see it in television news reports or documentaries, where a speaker's words are being translated for the audience.

This is particularly common in videos for social media, where video players don't have support for 'closed' captioning (more of which in the next paragraph). Subtitles might be ' burnt in' to the video: part of the actual video image and impossible to remove. Whether you're deaf, struggling with an accent, watching the video in a distracting environment, or just don't have the sound on, subtitles allow you to read the speech and sound of the video.

Subtitles (or captions - we'll use the terms interchangeably on this guide) are blocks of transcribed text that appear at the bottom of a video.
