Meet The Captioners

So earlier I waxed philosophical about, like, what it means to be a captioner, man. This is a companion piece of sorts, mercifully rooted far more in tangible reality. I wanted to talk a bit about what sort of people we are. Who is drawn to this kind of work, what skills and backgrounds do they have, what are they like as a group?

Super friendly.

Well, captioners trend very literate. Compulsively, fanatically, instinctually, neurotically literate. We dot eyes like Charles Schultz, and we cross teas like a chamomile Earl Grey chai. An attuned instinct here is actually of more use than a more conscious commitment to precise spelling and grammar. Quite often it needs to be automatic, because pre-air editing must routinely be hammered out extremely quickly (many news rundowns only become available minutes before our 15-30 minute stints) and a respeaker’s on-air editing and corrections can literally never command more than partial attention (we must always also be listening, speaking, checking the TV screen, and often googling names and managing cued text as well, and that’s if things are going right). We don’t perform elegant, refined surgery upon the language, but quick and dirty field medicine with a corkscrew and a rubber band. So anyway, if syntax is a cabaret old chum, then we’ll be the ones singing Tomorrow Belongs To Me.

Which is not to say we're prescriptivists <shudder>

We also trend highly news-literate. Of course there’s a chicken and an egg fighting for temporal primacy here, but I think most voice captioners were oft-enraged news-obsessives even before we started gargling with it for hours every day. The sort of people with hours-long think-piece-backlogs to read, and insurmountable daily Twitter feeds. Sport is a little more selective – many of us are enthusiasts of one shade or another, but many are not. And given the dozens of sports we cover, most will discover a few sporting passions they didn’t know they had, whether it be for WWE or Nordic Combined skiing. Obviously more generally, we also approach an unusually large volume of television with an uncommon degree of concentration, so a fair bit of television literacy is also kind of a given. We then have to be able to digest that volume of content without fatigue. Taken altogether, it boils down to us being a pack of big nerds.

In retrospect, delicious segregationist lollies really sent an ambiguous message.

The need for very clear and consistent diction also skews the demographics. Much-lauded in all discussions of voice captioning is the ability of Dragon or equivalent software to be customised to the idiosyncrasies of the user’s voice and accent. But it remains the case that some idiosyncrasies are more quickly trained in than others. More common and conventional accents begin to be recognised sooner than unusual hybrids, which inevitably limits the cultural diversity of our profession. But many different forms of Australian, Kiwi, Canadian, American and English Received Pronunciation all feature among the accents of the talented voice captioners with whom I work. The inclusiveness of live captioning is also compromised by the practical need that we be completely free of speech and (perhaps ironically) hearing impairments. The pipeline between our headphones and your screens must be as unobstructed as possible.

Perfect.

We trend a bit to the political left. Captioning may be one of the more steadily growing branches of the mainstream media, but it’s far from a goldmine and there are quicker ways to live out your sweaty Randian wet dream of capitalist world domination (plus HR refuse point blank to pay us in gold bars delivered to Galt's Gulch). We’re in it to help people. One of the major attractions of the work is getting to help include those who may otherwise find themselves excluded from cultural life. Deafness is just an impairment, but inaccessible media can conspire to make it a disability, and it's nice to be working against that. We’re also left of centre because, you know, see above re: literate.

We’re also slightly disproportionately young and unmarried, though there are plenty of exceptions. The hours can be a little weird. Our busiest news times are during the breakfast chat shows and the evening news, with most of the sport concentrated at weekends. So it helps to be flexible and fancy free enough to say yes to the generous penalty rates at evenings and weekends once in awhile. We’re basically a few standard deviations more likely to have cats than children.

So how did we get into this gig, what were we before we were captioners? Well, all kinds of things. 1980s rock musicians, postgraduate scholars writing on medieval literature, or television, or fantasy novels, law students, podcasters, teachers, journalists, actors, those high school kids who hung out in the library and formed an anime club, TV studio staffers, linguists, scriveners of all sorts. For a languagey (languid? linguical?) person, it’s not a bad thing to be.

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