I do feel for the colleague who just spruiked a production of "Pyramus and Frisbee". Can happen to the best of us.
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Tuesday 29 April 2014
Monday 28 April 2014
Unheimlich Underground Ennui
Live captioning software has come a long way since 1965. Nice to know this gig puts us in esteemed company!
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Sunday 27 April 2014
iheartsubtitles
So I'm new to blogging about captioning, but just heard about this phenomenal blog from a viewer's perspective. Particularly like this excellent piece on errors in captioning.
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Poem: How To Train Your Dragon
This piece is a kind of textual found-object. I had just captioned a half-hour late-night stint from a 24-hour news channel. Off air, I was combing over my output and teaching Dragon the words and phrases it got wrong, so it would learn for next time. After the session of training my Dragon, I was struck by this strange body of text. It compiled only the words and phrases which had defied easy comprehension, for one reason or another, and then repeated them again and again. There was some context (Dragon learns better with realistic syntax) but never enough. And I wondered whose voice it represented. Mine? My Dragon’s? The newsroom’s? The viewers’?
How To Train Your Dragon
Burned them alive, burned them alive, burned them alive.
Burned them alive, burned them alive, burned them alive.
Burned them alive, burned them alive, burned them alive.
They burned them alive. They burned them alive. They burned them alive.
They burned them alive.
They helped destroy.
Everyone here has a terrifying tale.
Alive, à la.
We have the blessing of Allah. We have Allah's blessing.
We have Allah's blessing. We have the blessing of Allah. Allah.
The Imam tells us this is our last test.
The Imam tells us this is our last test.
The Imam tells us this is our last test.
We await instructions from our Imam.
A large bull elephant.
A look at the morning's newspapers.
A look at the morning's newspapers.
A look at the morning's newspapers.
A look at the morning's newspapers.
A look at the morning's newspapers.
According to rumour,
Francois Hollande. President Hollande.
We listened to so much evidence
we listened to so much evidence.
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Marlee Matlin on captioning
An excellent poster-person for accessibility services - Marlee Matlin talks captioning. Also her earrings are a little bit Dharma Initiative. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/actress-marlee-matlin-touts-closed-captioning-initiative/ Bit of a fail having the program super over the subtitle though. Crowd-sourcing captions though. Innerestin'.
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Perfectly Executed Closed Captions
So this post from The Chive, "Perfectly Executed Closed Captions," deserves a mention. It's refreshing to see captioning whimsy emerge from a source other than mishaps, in at least a few of these. Describing non-verbal background cues is a strange little window of creativity for a live captioner. We have some leeway to describe music as we feel is appropriate, and to determine when silence is sufficiently portentous to warrant a mention.
So "screaming like a sissy" might fall foul of what we would consider appropriate gender discourse as broadcasters. But it might be the perfect articulation of the sound if, for example, one character had just demanded of another that they "stop screaming like a sissy".
"Walt Jr. vomiting" may not warrant a mention if we had just seen it happening in a preceding shot, but if the camera lingered on Walt, it might be important to know the sound persists. And whether to call him Walt Jr (I would elide the full-stop as our software tends to read that as the end of a sentence) or Flynn might depend on context.
"Phrase whore" makes me wonder a little. It could be a homophonous name which failed. Or it could be a verbal shortcut which went awry. Perhaps the software misheard "phrase four" which was supposed to be automatically replaced by a specified name. In any case, coarse language house styles should probably pick that up.
"(Dramatic instrumental music)," "(BLOWING SOUND)", "Cat sound", "(silence)", "laughing", "(jazz music playing)", "(sneezes, farts)," "(epic thrash metal)", "(melancholy guitar music)" and "(JOCKS LAUGHING)" each reflect really interesting creative choices by captioners. Whether to include these non-verbal cues and how to describe them is obviously integral to how closed-caption viewers interpret the program. You can see immediately, reading "dramatic instrumental music" contains none of the drama of actually hearing it, but it can still clarify the meaning of the visual information. Louis CK's words really would have less meaning if his syntax was transcribed without his many rhythmical and expressive pause utterances. We see in "laughing" how precisely duplicating onscreen information can become tedious or absurd, a kind of parodic reflection, but clarifying that she isn't screaming may be crucial.
The tennis screencap stretches credibility. For one thing, the sounds of tennis can reasonably be inferred from onscreen information. For another, captioning delay of a couple of seconds can render such pedantic play-by-play description rather meaningless. More on that in future posts about sport captioning.
Thanks also to The Chive for the banner which heads this blog. :)
Disclaimer.
So "screaming like a sissy" might fall foul of what we would consider appropriate gender discourse as broadcasters. But it might be the perfect articulation of the sound if, for example, one character had just demanded of another that they "stop screaming like a sissy".
"Walt Jr. vomiting" may not warrant a mention if we had just seen it happening in a preceding shot, but if the camera lingered on Walt, it might be important to know the sound persists. And whether to call him Walt Jr (I would elide the full-stop as our software tends to read that as the end of a sentence) or Flynn might depend on context.
"Phrase whore" makes me wonder a little. It could be a homophonous name which failed. Or it could be a verbal shortcut which went awry. Perhaps the software misheard "phrase four" which was supposed to be automatically replaced by a specified name. In any case, coarse language house styles should probably pick that up.
"(Dramatic instrumental music)," "(BLOWING SOUND)", "Cat sound", "(silence)", "laughing", "(jazz music playing)", "(sneezes, farts)," "(epic thrash metal)", "(melancholy guitar music)" and "(JOCKS LAUGHING)" each reflect really interesting creative choices by captioners. Whether to include these non-verbal cues and how to describe them is obviously integral to how closed-caption viewers interpret the program. You can see immediately, reading "dramatic instrumental music" contains none of the drama of actually hearing it, but it can still clarify the meaning of the visual information. Louis CK's words really would have less meaning if his syntax was transcribed without his many rhythmical and expressive pause utterances. We see in "laughing" how precisely duplicating onscreen information can become tedious or absurd, a kind of parodic reflection, but clarifying that she isn't screaming may be crucial.
The tennis screencap stretches credibility. For one thing, the sounds of tennis can reasonably be inferred from onscreen information. For another, captioning delay of a couple of seconds can render such pedantic play-by-play description rather meaningless. More on that in future posts about sport captioning.
Thanks also to The Chive for the banner which heads this blog. :)
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A Moment's Pause
...as we remember all our fellow captioners, fallen while attempting to respeak "Sergei Lavrov". And the Band Played "So Gay Lover Of".
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The white stuff
Congratulations to Andreas Wank for a fine performance in the ski jump. Apologies for referring to you on air only as "the German ski jumper", but our captioning software has some inconvenient filters.
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Chaste pine
Yes, captioning software. I *obviously* meant to say the biathlete took a "celibate tree lap". Brava.
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One does not simply...
Never imagined I'd one day be paid to repeatedly say the word "twizzle" into a microphone.
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Godwin's Dragon
Appreciate the effort, captioning software, but I think David Ferrer is more concerned about facing deuce in his service game, and less about facing Jews.
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Not entirely cricket
Apparently "shrill anchor" are serious contenders in the T20. Thanks, captioning software.
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Terrifying.
A captioning colleague breaks the news that a "Furby tenant" was at the helm of the sunken ferry. She may have meant third lieutenant, but if not, vengeful sentient Furbies would indeed be an alarming development.
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Jedi tramp stamps
I appreciate your nerd cred, captioning software, but I did mean body art, and not Luke Skywalker's home planet.
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Disclaimer.
This program is captioned live.
Ever see those little words? Maybe you were watching TV at a pub or cafe, and the sound was off. Maybe it was late at night, and you didn't want to wake the baby. Maybe you have a hearing impairment, and wish to remain engaged with the intellectual life of your society. If so, you'll have seen my work, and those of my colleagues.
There are a number of different ways of captioning TV. Sometimes we are furnished with pre-captioned content. A film which already exists on DVD, for example, will likely have pre-existing caption files, which can then simply be amended to the relevant market (re-timed to account for ad breaks, recoloured to adhere to Australian standards, spell-checked to fit Australian English etc). In other cases, we have early (anything from weeks in advance, to just before it goes to air) access to the audiovisual content, but no script. In that case, a transcript is prepared and checked back against the program. Both of these are considered "offline" captioning. They should be word-perfect, and will usually appear as "block" captions. In other words, a two-line phrase appears onscreen all at once, usually arranged to cover a discrete utterance, sentence, or phrase.
But where does that leave us when TV content is completely unscripted, as with live sport? Or partially scripted, as with news content? Well, that's where my work begins. I'm a live voice captioner.
There are two main types of live captioner - voice captioners and stenographers. Both produce "scrolling" captions (one word at a time, as distinct from block captions) from the streams of live sound being broadcast. Stenographers use shorthand machines, like you may see in courtrooms in old-timey movies, together with software which translates, formats and broadcasts it in real time. Their keystrokes directly send a cluster of letters, so they can rapidly type every sound they hear. If you ever see a word appear onscreen which looks like a cluster of unmatched letters, you might be seeing a stenographer making a typo. But go buy a lottery ticket - it doesn't happen much. They achieve very high levels of accuracy. I'm just over 98% accurate, they're 99+. But they take a lot of training, and there aren't that many around. They're more expensive, and their Jedi-like talents are best reserved for very important, difficult or popular live programming.
Voice captioners like me basically respeak everything we hear into a piece of voice recognition software (I use Dragon, which is like Siri's badass cousin) which is trained and tailored to my voice. I speak in a clear, expressionless tone, giving spoken commands for colour changes and punctuation. I then watch what is coming out and can type quick corrections. If you see an error which looks like a homophone, like "Netanyahu" coming out as "net and Yahoo", you're probably seeing a voice captioner at work. People tend to assume that such errors are the result of an entirely automated process which has gone haywire, but while there is this element of software misrecognition, there is generally a human at the wheel. This is in part because voice recognition software is not great at responding to changes in speaker, in part because the software is hopeless at sensing conversational punctuation, and in part because a human operator is far better at disambiguating similar words and phrases. Simply put, we know which "there/they're/their" the newsreader means, and can even adjust for their much-loved puns. Dragon makes educated guesses based on context, and is good with common phrases, but the work of captioning remains a human (or at best a little cyborg) affair. We also employ what are called "house styles", which are like manually created autocorrect rules, and which can be grouped as required. Thus a "cycling" house style might include a rule that "pelican" is always changed to "peloton", and you could apply it for Tour de France coverage, then take it off for nature documentaries.
We don't have to get everything - between me and the software the captions lag about two seconds behind the action, so in sport it would be inconvenient to have every word captioned when the action will have already moved on. Also, people can speak at about 140 words a minute, but many don't read that fast. It's thus quite common for a 15 minute live stint to yield a text output of over 2000 words, which is an awful lot of moving text to read. But we get as much as we can of what we hear, and paraphrase when we have to.
I hope in the course of this blog to share some thoughts, insights and anecdotes from this strange little corner of broadcast journalism and disability services. As a lover of the written word, I want to capture how the superimposition of the very old medium of spoken word storytelling and the very new medium of digital television creates interesting tensions. I want to share some of the funny mishaps, some of the unique perspectives and some of the quirky personalities that inhabit the world of the live captioner.
Disclaimer.
There are a number of different ways of captioning TV. Sometimes we are furnished with pre-captioned content. A film which already exists on DVD, for example, will likely have pre-existing caption files, which can then simply be amended to the relevant market (re-timed to account for ad breaks, recoloured to adhere to Australian standards, spell-checked to fit Australian English etc). In other cases, we have early (anything from weeks in advance, to just before it goes to air) access to the audiovisual content, but no script. In that case, a transcript is prepared and checked back against the program. Both of these are considered "offline" captioning. They should be word-perfect, and will usually appear as "block" captions. In other words, a two-line phrase appears onscreen all at once, usually arranged to cover a discrete utterance, sentence, or phrase.
But where does that leave us when TV content is completely unscripted, as with live sport? Or partially scripted, as with news content? Well, that's where my work begins. I'm a live voice captioner.
There are two main types of live captioner - voice captioners and stenographers. Both produce "scrolling" captions (one word at a time, as distinct from block captions) from the streams of live sound being broadcast. Stenographers use shorthand machines, like you may see in courtrooms in old-timey movies, together with software which translates, formats and broadcasts it in real time. Their keystrokes directly send a cluster of letters, so they can rapidly type every sound they hear. If you ever see a word appear onscreen which looks like a cluster of unmatched letters, you might be seeing a stenographer making a typo. But go buy a lottery ticket - it doesn't happen much. They achieve very high levels of accuracy. I'm just over 98% accurate, they're 99+. But they take a lot of training, and there aren't that many around. They're more expensive, and their Jedi-like talents are best reserved for very important, difficult or popular live programming.
Voice captioners like me basically respeak everything we hear into a piece of voice recognition software (I use Dragon, which is like Siri's badass cousin) which is trained and tailored to my voice. I speak in a clear, expressionless tone, giving spoken commands for colour changes and punctuation. I then watch what is coming out and can type quick corrections. If you see an error which looks like a homophone, like "Netanyahu" coming out as "net and Yahoo", you're probably seeing a voice captioner at work. People tend to assume that such errors are the result of an entirely automated process which has gone haywire, but while there is this element of software misrecognition, there is generally a human at the wheel. This is in part because voice recognition software is not great at responding to changes in speaker, in part because the software is hopeless at sensing conversational punctuation, and in part because a human operator is far better at disambiguating similar words and phrases. Simply put, we know which "there/they're/their" the newsreader means, and can even adjust for their much-loved puns. Dragon makes educated guesses based on context, and is good with common phrases, but the work of captioning remains a human (or at best a little cyborg) affair. We also employ what are called "house styles", which are like manually created autocorrect rules, and which can be grouped as required. Thus a "cycling" house style might include a rule that "pelican" is always changed to "peloton", and you could apply it for Tour de France coverage, then take it off for nature documentaries.
We don't have to get everything - between me and the software the captions lag about two seconds behind the action, so in sport it would be inconvenient to have every word captioned when the action will have already moved on. Also, people can speak at about 140 words a minute, but many don't read that fast. It's thus quite common for a 15 minute live stint to yield a text output of over 2000 words, which is an awful lot of moving text to read. But we get as much as we can of what we hear, and paraphrase when we have to.
I hope in the course of this blog to share some thoughts, insights and anecdotes from this strange little corner of broadcast journalism and disability services. As a lover of the written word, I want to capture how the superimposition of the very old medium of spoken word storytelling and the very new medium of digital television creates interesting tensions. I want to share some of the funny mishaps, some of the unique perspectives and some of the quirky personalities that inhabit the world of the live captioner.
Disclaimer.
Disclaimer
This blog is intended to provide an insight into the work of live TV captioning - its challenges, techniques, successes, failures and significance. The views and opinions expressed here are my own, and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer. In particular, the techniques and practices discussed herein do not necessarily reflect best practice as defined either by my employer, or by industry standards. Up to date information on the latter can be found here.
I strongly respect our clients' intellectual property. As such, specific clients and programs will not be named, and any examples will not disclose anything restricted by copyright. The focus will be on the work of captioning, not on content. Where examples are given from scripted and fictional television, all program-specific details will be removed. Where news, current affairs and sport are discussed, all stories mentioned will have already broken, both on our client broadcasters and online, and will be in the public domain. Put simply, there will be no scoops and no spoilers. If you feel I have slipped up somewhere and your intellectual property is being misused, please contact me and I will immediately remove the offending material.
I strongly respect our clients' intellectual property. As such, specific clients and programs will not be named, and any examples will not disclose anything restricted by copyright. The focus will be on the work of captioning, not on content. Where examples are given from scripted and fictional television, all program-specific details will be removed. Where news, current affairs and sport are discussed, all stories mentioned will have already broken, both on our client broadcasters and online, and will be in the public domain. Put simply, there will be no scoops and no spoilers. If you feel I have slipped up somewhere and your intellectual property is being misused, please contact me and I will immediately remove the offending material.
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