A German picture with English dialogue does not need English subtitles for a German-speaking audience. It may still need English (or German) on a newspaper headline, a text message insert, or a line spoken in a third language. That small file is forced narrative. A full subtitle file is every line. SDH is every line plus non-speech. Burning the English titles into a foreign master and calling the export localised is none of those three; it is an English master with a confusing filename.
The three files ride with different masters because they answer different viewers. Forced narrative stays on even when the audience has captions off, which is why it is often burned in rather than sidecared: the plot depends on it. Full subs and SDH are usually closed tracks. Mixing them — burning a full English subtitle file into a German cut — produces a film that is unreadable to the people it was supposedly made for.
AI caption generators default to full-dialogue transcripts. They will not decide which lines are forced. That is an editorial pass: list the on-screen text and the foreign speech, caption only those, and keep the file separate from the SDH and from the full translation. The long guide on this split is the blog post the term points at; this page is only the definition.
In practice
- Make forced narrative its own file. Do not hide it inside the full subtitle track and hope a player sorts it out.
- Burn forced narrative when the plot depends on a sign or a letter; sidecar the full dialogue.
- Never treat a burned English title card as a localised German version.
The mistake to avoid
Burning a full subtitle file into a foreign-language picture and calling it forced narrative. Forced means the few lines that must appear, not all of them.
Go deeper
Forced narrative vs full subtitle files
Forced narrative is on with subtitles off: a foreign line or plot-critical sign. Full subtitles are the dialogue you turn on. Separate files, not a burn-in.
Where you will run into it
- Add Captions to a Video — Speech in, styled subtitles out — no manual timing.
- Add a Text Overlay to a Video — Your words, placed exactly where you want them.
- AI Caption Generator — Drop a video, get timed captions. Free, on your device, no upload.
Related terms
Burned-in captions
Burned-in captions meaning: subtitles rendered into pixels, so viewers cannot turn them off or lose them on re-upload. Closed captions are a separate track.
Closed captions
Closed captions are a separate subtitle track the player draws, which the viewer can switch off and which each platform styles itself.
SDH
SDH is a caption track that includes speech and non-speech audio — [door slams], [music], speaker IDs — so the file is usable without sound.
Speech-to-text
Speech-to-text meaning: converting spoken audio into written text, the transcript captions, translation, and search all depend on.
Hook rate
Hook rate meaning: the share of people shown a video who are still watching a few seconds in. It grades the opening, not the body.
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