might be a supid question,,,, but what are subtitles?

[mtrichardson]

I have been authoring DVDs for a while and everyone talks about subtitles and I can't find a definition here on the site.... can someone explain to me the importance of them... sorry for not knowing!

[tgm4883]

subtitles are the dialog at the bottom of the screen telling you what the actors are saying

[penamty]

Maybe if you only watch movies spoken in your own language you have never had any use for them, but believe me the majority of the world speak other languages (my native language is Spanish), and regardless of the language you speak they are quite useful for other purposes. For example I learned German by buying DVDs of movies and TV series from the German Amazon website, and believe me that been able to watch what was being spoken was extremely useful, and of course there are also closed captions, which are a kind of subtitles developed for the hearing impaired.