A day in the life of subtitles

Francesca Bussey's story...

My name is Francesca Bussey, I am part of the Access Services and Localisation Team, and I focus specifically on our pre-recorded subtitles provision. I can hear but British Sign Language is my first language as I’m a CODA (child of deaf adults) - my parents are/were both profoundly deaf. I grew up within the Deaf community, so I love that my job involves working on our subtitles provision, and making TV accessible for d/Deaf and Hard of Hearing people.

This is an exciting time in the subtitling team as we move towards subtitling more and more of our content across all our platforms. I’ve been at Sky for 15 years and it’s been amazing to be part of the growth of subtitling for on demand content, box sets, and streaming as well as all our linear content.

My role primarily involves allocating programmes to subtitle for all our channels and platforms. Our team subtitles everything from Rob & Romesh to Batman to a documentary about 18^th century violin-makers. Whatever we’re subtitling, we’re always thinking of the best way to let subtitles make the viewing experience better – never intrusive, but always accurate, informative and reflecting the mood of the programme.

We often work with scripts provided by production companies, but a subtitle file is much more than a script. We use colours, punctuation, sound description, and other tools to convey the tone and meaning of a programme – the aim is always to give all viewers the same experience of a programme.

I’m very proud to be part of a team that delivers such a vital service, one that I feel personally passionate about. And of course, as ever, we welcome the conversation with our customers about subtitles, and always strive to improve.

Francesca Bussey