"Same Language Subtitling" is an idea that is as deceptively simple as it is effective. Born out of a brainwave of Brij Kothari, Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, Same Language Subtitling (SLS) is an award winning idea of subtitling the lyrics of song-based programmes on TV in the ’same’ language as the audio. For instance, SLS suggests subtitling Hindi songs in Hindi (Devanagari script), Tamil songs in Tamil, and so on in any language. Not to be confused with translation subtitling, SLS aims to elicit a ‘what you hear is what you read’ response among viewers.

Why songs, you ask. SLS, as a concept, has been tried before. And, in most of its avatars, it has failed. The major stumbling block is the inability of the viewers to relate between the words being spoken on screen and the captions being displayed below. The beauty of using songs is the sheer ubiquitousness of Bollywood and regional cinema. A large part of the population, whether literate or not, is very familiar with the lyrics to these songs. This familiarity is well-exploited by SLS where all that remains to be done is create a connect between the words that the viewers already know and the text that flows at the bottom of the screen. Kothari’s version of SLS does this by colour coding the text as the relevant words are spoken - much like a Karaoke display.

Brij is an Ashoka Fellow, President of PlanetRead, a non-profit involved in scaling SLS efforts in India and other countries. He is also the CEO of BookBox, Inc, a for-profit social venture producing children’s animated stories in more than 20 languages. He co-founded PlanetRead.org and BookBox.com as a Reuters Digital Vision Fellow at Stanford.

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Kothari’s moment of epiphany happened while pursuing a master’s degree in communication at Cornell University in New York. His project frequently took him to Ecuador and he needed to understand Spanish. "So I used to watch a lot of Spanish films with English subtitles. One day, suddenly I thought: Why not Spanish films with Spanish subtitles? It’d be a better way of learning the language. Adding text to the audio, you could actually follow what the native speaker says. Then I exclaimed, ‘Why not add subtitles to the popular film song programs in India? This way those who had rudimentary knowledge of the alphabets could learn to read!’" The casual thought took shape when he returned to teach at the Centre for Educational Innovation at his alma mater in Ahmedabad. Kothari’s idea was to use entertainment to augment reading habits among early literates, school dropouts, even adults. "Since a huge number of children and adults watch TV for entertainment, even in rural areas of India, why not use this resource to get an educational benefit out of it?"

India’s impossible problem is that even though India’s literacy rate is rising, it is a well-known fact that skill levels remain very low among half the people whom our census considers to be literate. In other words, one-third of India’s population is fully literate, one-third non-literate and one-third at early stages of literacy (but not functionally literate).

The SLS project was conceived six years ago and has been financed by different agencies at various stages. The major funders in the past have been the Indian government’s Ministry of HRD (Dept. of Education), DECU-Indian Space Research Organisation in Ahmedabad, and Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. UNESCO (Delhi) too made a contribution at the beginning of the project. Earlier this year the project came up a winner in Development Marketplace, the World Bank’s Global Innovation Competition. “This latest funding is contributing to scaling up the idea to the national level and also determining its impact on all three groups: the non-, early-, and fully-literate people,” says Kothari.

Recently, the Google Foundation awarded PlanetRead a grant to increase the number of SLS programs available, and Google is also supporting PlanetRead with free advertising through the Google Grants program and content hosting on Google Video.

SLS is currently broadcast in 10 languages, covering most states in India. It serves as a teaching tool to motivate nearly 290 million people who are illiterate and integrates reading into the lives of an additional 400 million who are early-literate. On Chitrahaar or Rangoli, SLS gives subliminal reading practice to 150 million people (or 100 million early literates), on a weekly basis. The cost? One US Dollar gives weekly reading practice to 10,000 people for one year. This is less than one paisa per person per year. Typically, programs of the National Literacy Mission have budgeted in the range of Rs. 150/- per person per year, for post-literacy.

Two research projects have shown that SLS contributes to reading skill improvement. In a controlled experiment with primary school children, greater improvement in reading skills was found in the group that saw subtitled songs as compared to the group that saw songs without subtitles(Kothari et al., 2001a; Kothari and Takeda, 2000). Subsequently, SLS was implemented in a natural setting. Chitrageet, a weekly Gujarati film song program was shown, with SLS, on state television in Gujarat(DDK, Ahmedabad). With a partially literate sample drawn from villages and city slums - not attending formal or non-formal education — it was found that people who watched the subtitled Chitrageet regularly, showed greater improvement in reading skills than people who saw the program infrequently (Kothari et al., 2001b). The group differences in both the studies were statistically significant, implying consistent improvement across group members in the subtitled group. These results are noteworthy given the short-term exposure to subtitling. They confirm the contribution that SLS can make incrementally to literacy on a mass scale. As a lifelong process, this contribution could be substantial. There is more on the effectiveness of this approach in an article in the MIT journal of Information Technologies and International Development here. Qualitative data through post-cards, obtained by the researchers and independently by DDK, were consistent in documenting not only the popularity of subtitled over unsubtitled songs, but also the use of SLS toward edutainment goals.

SLS is not merely a noble idea. The economics are astounding. Not only is the National Literacy Mission being given a fillip by this low-cost alternative but more and more corporates are waking up to the idea that literacy can be a smart idea. K.S. Sharma, CEO of Prasar Bharati, gives proof as he mentions how more and more SLS programming content is being sponsored across the various channels by private players. The viewers are tuning in. And the corporates are listening.

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