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| Some overviews are more useful than others. |
Exclusive live sport is increasingly integral in sustaining the business model of broadcast television. Sport remains stubbornly at its best when viewed live, socially (in person), and on those megalithic miniature cinemas in our living rooms or pubs, rather than the matchbook-sized televisions in our pockets, or the procrastination-and-cat-picture machines on our desks. While the world moves online, broadcast sport is flourishing almost as much as ever, so by volume, the combination of news and sport constitutes the bulk of the work of the live captioner.
But some very distinct disciplines are involved in transcribing the vocal crescendos of a roomful of sweaty and excitable besuited millionaires watching fit young people do skilful things with some kind of orb, in a way which enhances viewer comprehension. The news is compiled from pre-scripted fragments and a fluid running order, and presents an aurally complicated but visually bland narrative, centred on the newsreader’s voice. Live sport, on the other hand, is unscripted, visually engaging, and with a narrative at least as much driven by the shot selection (here I’m talking directors, not batsmen) as by the commentators. If captions for a couple of sentences in a row of news content were missing, the comprehensibility of that story has definitely taken a hit; in sport, the visual narrative spine can survive some missing auditory information. We all know this, because not every sports bar enables captions on its screens (though the better ones do), and because decorum obviously dictates very different levels of quiet for a beer-and-movie night than for a beer-and-football night (different again for a beer-and-Four Corners night, because ABC thug life).
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| Talk during Kerry's opening monologue, and Mary-Sue McStockphoto will end you. |
This means our first duty as sports captioners is to ensure we leave the visual narrative unimpeded. That dictates the cardinal rule – stay out of the way. Sometimes literally – as I’ve said, line 1, on the top of the screen, making sure to clear any score graphics, is a good rule of thumb for sports caption placement. There’s a bit more to it than that though.
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| Bottom line, stay out of the way, or people can't see the TV. |
Captions can be ‘in the way’ in another sense – as a distraction. An eye movement study cited by Media Access Australia found that closed captions viewers spend 88 percent of their viewing time reading scrolling captions, 67 percent of their time if it’s block captions. But block captions are problematical for live programming anyhow, of course, since all the words need to be received before the caption can begin to be displayed, which exacerbates delays. So scrolling captions it is. Now, it’s safe to assume that seasoned caption viewers avoid that 88% figure while watching sports, by picking and choosing when they read the commentary. But it illustrates that as a matter of course, scrolling captions are a significant distraction from the visuals, and like reading text messages while driving, it may take more of your attention than you realise.
So that’s the next aspect of “stay out of the way” – avoid being a distraction. That particularly comes into play in sports where all the action comes in brief, sporadic bursts – like tennis, golf, cricket and American football. In the first three of those, the commentators conveniently play ball as well, usually falling into an atmospheric hush a little before each play, often leaving enough time to let the captions finish and then quickly clear them before anything starts to happen. It’s fun, much tea is sipped while respeaking these sports.
In other sports, however, action and commentary don’t alternate so conveniently, and then “stay out of the way” imposes two further strictures: don’t caption anything you don’t need to, and don’t caption anything you can’t. Take a look at this 15 second clip of soccer commentary:
Warning: the preceding video and transcript contain language which some may find Australian. Reader discretion was advised.
There’s another post in the works about how we tackle obscenity, but in the meantime, let’s look a little more closely at how we would caption that. First of all, you avoid captioning anything the viewer can see for themselves. So “they’re having a pre-game dance” adds little in the way of clarification or analysis and only duplicates what obviously appears onscreen. But “I know the drugs are good here, but that’s arrogant” adds colour and opinion, and should be captioned. For clarity you might then change it to “that dance was arrogant”, remembering that the captioning delay means it won’t sync up. Similarly, “he shows him a Red Mitsy” is a colourful turn of phrase which adds something to the commentary, but if all he had said was “red card”, the visuals would adequately have it covered. If he’d dropped the umpire’s name though, that may be some clarification which goes beyond the visually obvious, and could be included. He doesn’t mention scores or other statistics, but if he had, the same rules would apply – if it’s already onscreen (which it usually is), don’t caption what you don’t need to.
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| Dog |
Then there’s what we can’t caption – the moment-by-moment play of the ball. In news captioning, a four second delay is reasonably harmless, since the bulk of the information comes in the form of an uninterrupted aural stream, and even if you read the final words four seconds into the end credits, you can comfortably say you’ve watched the news and I can say I’ve captioned it. But in sport, a four-second delay might mean five passes, making the descriptive captions quite meaningless. It would mean, in the above clip, by the time that “Here’s Cavani” appeared onscreen, we might be seeing the blocked shot at goal, or Chiellini clutching his shoulder, or maybe Suarez high-fiving Hannibal Lecter. Probably not Cavani though. But again, opinion and commentary aren’t so meticulously time-sensitive. Hearing “Fuck no, Suarez, he is a rodent” a few seconds late still pretty much conveys its meaning, so that should be captioned.
The question “what the fuck happened there?” is more ambivalent. Often when a commentator asks a question, the delay makes it redundant. So if in the next few seconds, we saw a slow-motion replay which told us exactly what the fuck happened there, as is likely, that question appearing afterwards might not be much use. It’s more pointedly illustrated by simpler questions like “he kicks long – will it go in?” It would be a long kick indeed which hung in the air long enough for the caption to appear before the sphere reaches the checkpoint (I don’t really know sports). Of course, the Bogan Aussie commentator’s question was probably rhetorical, expressing disbelief or asking what had happened in Suarez’s head, so we may well caption it. The good news is, we do tend to still catch the highlights of the play of the ball. When someone takes an extended possession, or causes a stoppage for any reason, that’s conveniently when commentators tend to talk about them more tangentially (and less time-sensitively), and that’s likely to be the “clarification and analysis” stuff which we do caption. That’s when we’ll hear what a good season he’s having, or how many marks he’s taken this game, or who he transferred from last season. So in that context, captions viewers will still see the names of players who go for a run, or get shown in replays, or start a fight, or challenge a call, just not the five names in a row you might get during a quick succession of passes. Unfortunately, we don’t caption what we can’t caption clearly, and “stay out of the way” condemns superflux.
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| ...or for those reading verbatim captions, “here's the interception, but he's got a lot of work ahead of him to get past these four defenders. I wonder if he can make something of this?” |
So the other thing to think about when captioning sport is vocab. I mentioned way back in my very first post how we can write our own sets of custom autocorrect rules, called house styles. Well, sports are where they really come into their own – most captioners will maintain their own separate house style for each sport they caption, so that when you have the WWE one enabled, it knows to capitalise the Yes Movement, but when you don’t, you won’t unintentionally make the Scottish independence campaign look like a weird cult. When you have your soccer house style enabled, it knows to replace “read card” with “red card”. And when you have the cricket house style enabled, it knows to replace “England win” with “England wrest defeat from the jaws of victory”, because that has to be what you meant to say in that context.
You also need to train your Dragon to recognise general vocab for the sport. This will include the names of great former players, current champions, commentators, positions, and technical terms.
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| Otherwise you end up with this. |
Once that’s done, you’re almost good to go – just need to google the game-specific vocab (from a reputable source!), names of the players, stadium, umpires and teams (including nicknames) playing today. Train those into Dragon, look out for errant homophones (this excellent piece in The Monthly illustrates the difficulties presented by the AFL’s proliferation of different spellings of “Jarrod”), create verbal shortcuts for difficult names, and keep a team list open while you’re on air, so anything which is coming out wrong can be copied in.
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| May need a house style. |
At the end of all this, there is one uniquely rewarding thing about captioning sport – exposure. So many public places show sport with captions, and the audience are often passionately attentive viewers. That’s a nice thing to remember, if, like me, your understanding of sport is at times a little limited.
Disclaimer.
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