
Ask HN: Why are there no closed captions for the “vocabulary impaired”? - amichail
Such a feature would automatically show you the definitions of difficult words that you may not know.<p>That way, you don&#x27;t even need to pause your movie&#x2F;TV show to look up the meaning of a word.<p>Wouldn&#x27;t that improve vocabulary significantly and be relatively easy to implement?
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Piskvorrr
Not sure what exactly you mean. Do you mean subtitles like this? (with
apologies to George Lucas and thanks to
[http://xkcd.com/simplewriter/](http://xkcd.com/simplewriter/) )

It is a time of people's war. Space ships of people who do not agree, hitting
from a hidden home, have won their first win against the bad Many-Star-Group
Big-Country. During the fight, people who steal hidden information for people
who do not agree managed to steal hidden plans to the Big-Country's greatest
attack thing, the DEATH STAR, a hard-metal covered space house with enough
power to put away an entire large space home ball.

In such case, it would probably be better to see _both_ the simplified and
original subtitles, no?

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27182818284
It isn't a pain point for most people. In addition to that, for some people
like myself, it is the opposite of a pain point as I don't mind learning new
words by looking them up.

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amichail
What's wrong with learning new words WITHOUT looking them up?

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Piskvorrr
It does sound as an interesting experiment. I wonder if there's a thesaurus
mapping English to (a) simple English...although I can imagine that output of
such experiment would not be exactly fluent.

I'm not sure that I'd be able to keep up with all the state - 1.story,
2.visual, 3.spoken word, 4.simplified subtitles and their map to 3 (even
"normal" subtitles are pretty distracting).

edit: Let me abuse another classic for an example - something like that
(emphasized words would be the subtitles)?

"All _ancient land name_ is _split_ into three parts, one of which the _tribe
name_ _live_ , the _tribe name_ another, those who in their own language are
called _tribe name_ , in ours _tribe name_ , the third. All these differ from
each other in language, _what they do_ and laws. The river Garonne _splits_
the Gauls from the Aquitani; the Marne and the Seine _split_ them from the
Belgae. Of all these, the Belgae are the _most brave_ , because they are _most
far_ from the _Roman cities_ and _development_ of [our] _part of the world_ ,
and _sellers_ _not often_ _go_ to them and _bring_ those things which tend to
_make weak_ the mind; and they are the _closest_ to the _tribe name_ , who
_live_ beyond the Rhine, with whom they are _all the time_ _making_ war; for
which reason the _tribe name_ also _are better than_ the rest of the Gauls in
_being brave_ , as they _fight_ with the Germans in almost daily _fights_ ,
when they either _chase away_ them from their own _lands_ , or themselves
_attack_ on their _borders_.

~~~
amichail
Instead of simplified subtitles, you would just see the definition of a rare
word that was just said.

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GFK_of_xmaspast
How do you know what is and is not a rare word.

~~~
Piskvorrr
Language corpus: feed a large collection of texts into database, sort by word
frequency. The lower the frequency, the rarer the word.

