Two subtitles for the same episode, same language, same release. One is marked HI. Which do you take?
What the tag stands for
HI is short for hearing impaired. In the streaming world the same thing is called SDH, subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing, and closed captions (CC) in the United States are the broadcast version of the idea. All three describe a subtitle that carries more than the dialogue:
- sounds that matter to the story, in brackets:
[door slams],[phone buzzing],[distant gunfire] - music, marked with notes or a description:
♪ soft piano ♪,[tense music] - who is speaking when it is not obvious, as a name or a label:
WALTER: We need to talk.or(on radio) Copy that. - tone, when the words alone would mislead:
[sarcastically],[whispering]
For a viewer who cannot hear the soundtrack, that information is the difference between following the film and guessing. A knock that nobody reacts to, a song that tells you the year, a voice from another room: the plain subtitle leaves all of it out.
Who wants which
If you watch with the sound on and understand the language of the audio, the plain subtitle is usually the better read: fewer lines, nothing to skip past. Sound descriptions can feel like someone narrating over the film.
If you watch with the sound off (on a train, next to a sleeping child), the HI version is the one that keeps the story whole. The same goes for anyone learning the language: the speaker labels make fast scenes with several voices far easier to follow.
Deaf and hard of hearing viewers are the reason the format exists, and for them there is no choice to make. It is also why we ask uploaders not to strip the HI cues from a file and re-upload it as plain without saying so; both versions have a reader.
How to spot one before you download
On this site every file's page says whether it is hearing impaired, next to the format and the line count, and the list on a title page shows an HI badge. We detect it when a file arrives: a file whose cues are bracketed sound descriptions, speaker labels in capitals or music notes beside real captions is marked HI. Song lyrics on their own are not enough, because every anime opening has a line of notes and that is not a caption.
Elsewhere, look for HI or SDH in the file name, or open the file and read the first minute. Brackets on their own lines are the giveaway.
Turning an HI file into a plain one
Sometimes the only subtitle in your language is the HI one and you would rather not have the descriptions. Subtitle Edit (Windows, free) has a "Remove text for hearing impaired" tool that strips bracketed lines and speaker names in one pass and lets you preview what goes. Aegisub can do it with a search and replace on \[.*?\]. Do it on a copy; if you upload the result, say in the notes that it is the HI file with descriptions removed and name the file you started from, so the credit reaches the person who timed it.
Why we care about the label
Because a wrong label costs the wrong person. A viewer who needs descriptions and downloads a plain file loses half the film; a viewer who wanted the dialogue and gets an HI file just sighs. So the label is checked by machine on every upload and can be corrected by any moderator, and if you spot one that is wrong, the report button on the file's page takes ten seconds.
