You always tell me - mishaps, mishaps, mishaps.

Welcome to another bumper edition of “things my voice recognition software thought I was saying and hilariously put on the air”!

Captioning the weather remains a little fraught – on cooler mornings we’ve seen predictions of “Mr Fogg”, in lieu of mist and fog. That guy is such a damp squib. In a similar vein, the weather was due to turn “Uncle Gene you will” (and here’s me thinking “uncongenial” makes more sense). Uncle Gene, you will always ruin our picnics. Another gentleman made an unexpected appearance in a parenting segment – we heard of young children “going through that Todd LaFace”. Call me old fashioned, but I find it easier to go around him.

Though Mr LaFace can be stubborn.

We’ve been hearing from an assortment of world leaders in the run up to the latest apocalypses. Among them, French president “France were blonde”. I guess France has been touching up its roots, or perhaps there is new polling data showing gentlemen prefer Hollandes. I think the best thing there is Dragon thinking I must pronounce it as a bisyllabic “buh-LONDE”, which is tremendously Mean Girls. Now while I understand that challenging Russia militarily and diplomatically doesn’t present easy options, I was surprised to read, right there in my own captions, President Obama suggesting “imposing tough Saxons on Putin”. Cold War II just turned surprisingly creative-anachronist.

Lots too on the subject of the Scottish independence referendum (when will we see its like again?). One salient point is that compared with the Westminster elite, Scotland’s parliament is described as more egalitarian. Or as a colleague alarmingly captioned it, “more Gaelic Aryan”. Lots of criticism in all quarters for how the debate was covered by various media – though I think it’s a bit drastic that Dragon suggested “the media must come under intense strychnine”. Scrutiny would probably suffice. One of our news clients promised to provide “up the date information” on the debate, proving there is indeed a fine line between information and too much information. We heard a bit about Mary Pitcaithly, the Chief Counting Officer in the referendum. She was previously awarded an OBE, but Dragon thought she had received “adobe”. Which I guess means she can either edit PDFs, or live in a cool house in Santa Fe. The currency question also gave me some grief as a captioner. Dragon bestowed upon the Bank of England “regular tree power”. And when I went to correct it, Dragon eagerly jumped in with “regular Tory power”. Evidently a Yes-voting Dragon.

Aye.

In assorted other on-air mishaps: texting while driving was described as a “nude driving hazard”. Novelty and nudity are after all so interchangeable. That story saw modern cars described as “social media-mobiles”, and I remembered a split second too late that “mobiles” when not preceded by “auto” isn’t pronounced like that. Sure enough, out came “mauve eels”. A contest during a breakfast program was started by the host with the words “one, two, three, goat!” I must admit to having to switch off my mic for a second to avoid putting my laughter to air. It’s always interesting how one error can precipitate another. Thus with a phrase like “really stick my neck out”, an understandable initial error snowballs into the incomprehensible “realistic iMac out”.

Well played, Google Image.

In offline captioning (thankfully non-live, so corrected before airing), some beautiful things happened in a nature documentary. I learned that “the monotreme family consists of platypus and UKIP.” No wonder Nigel Farage can be so prickly. We then heard that platypus in captivity are fed “yuppies”. While I accept that they probably meant an Australian freshwater crustacean, I am deeply enamoured with the idea of a carnivorous class warrior monotreme. And then of course, we had echidnas using their lengthy noseparts to “fish for termites in trees and blogs”. Guess I’d better watch my step. We were after all warned that they aren’t safe to “pat and Kabul” – I’m not sure Kabul is ever perfectly safe. Finally the program crossed to Shark Bay in WA, which my Dragon didn’t recognise as a place, instead suggesting “shark bait NWA”. I may not have the confidence to diss Dr Dre, but evidently Dragon does, so kudos.

Finally, one last bit of silliness from captioning Catholic mass. A Gospel reading focusing on John the Baptist saw him telling the religious leaders of the day, “I am not the Prophet”. But Dragon, sensing a familiar phrase, rendered it as “I am not-for-profit”. Good to know, JBap – be sure to put that on your tax return.

“Can I get a receipt for that?”

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Disclaimer.

The obscene on-screen: Captioning vulgarity

I love me some vulgarity. A well-delivered obscenity, preferably during the most serious and sacred of occasions, is a thing of mighty fusking cloth-prunking loveliness. And anything which enhances the residual purity and primness against which the swearing cuts is all the better. That’s why a dirty vicar, a trash-talking Barbie doll, or the pristine received pronunciation of Stephen Fry can represent swearing at its most delicious.

There are some interesting practical and ethical considerations, then, when it comes to captioning obscenity. Television is itself the kind of sacred space which makes for a really delightful foray into the blue. In the fact of its very broadcast identity, it forms a backdrop of irreducible publicity, coupled with intimate domesticity. It comes into your house, and that of your teacher, boss and grandparent, as well as the proverbial town square, and says a great deal that is unsayable (interesting then that the HBO network feels the need to deny its very identity as TV).

Even setting aside timeslot-, network-, and location-specific rules governing the profane, the potential scope of the audience lends significance to any outbreak of unwonted colour. All the more so in any market where the operative standards of journalistic professionalism, or sponsorial squeamishness, or a more “family” audience hold sway (for as we all know, angry teenagers, independent adults and the mature of mind can’t be “family”).

Family guy.

Captions contain yet another dimension of sanctity – that of the written word. I mentioned in discussing caption accuracy the heightened standards of polish to which we naturally hold written prose, and the resultant tensions in transcribing the spoken word. Here too, such sanctity comes into play. There is arguably an added punch to seeing, in neatly scrolling printed subtitles, a commentator calling her colleague festering dunderhead, compared with merely hearing the muttered words.

So we must wield our power with caution, doubly so when bearing in mind the technology of voice captioning. Our Anglophone swear words are etymologically diverse, but whether Romantic, Germanic, Norman or the many shades of “other” (and Melissa Mohr has done some fascinating work on the different historical taboos which manifest in different cultures’ litanies of vulgarity), they’re very often ancient, fundamental, and monosyllabic. As attested to by any bawdy limerick, they rhyme easily and diversely. George Carlin discovered that this delightful musicality extends both to exemplifying and alluding to vulgarity. Take a minute out of your day and watch this:

“Dirty, filthy, foul, vile, vulgar, coarse. In-poor-taste, unseemly, street-talk, gutter-talk, locker-room language, barracks talk. Bawdy, naughty, saucy, raunchy. Rude, crude, lewd, lascivious, indecent, profane, obscene, blue, off-colour. Risqué, suggestive, cursin’, cussin’, swearin’. And all I could think of were shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits.”

Carlin had a number of famous routines built around the last seven words, which is why the crowd begins applauding when he reaches them. They outline a kind of classical swearology, most notably augmented today by a set of no-longer-acceptable epithets denoting (and enacting) discrimination. The array of short, sharp and unacceptable racial slurs is perhaps ironically a paragon of diversity, and they too trend monosyllabical and easy to say. Our vulgarities are so fundamental that we can describe them as the N-word, the F-word, the C-word etc, and be easily understood.

Sequels suck.

So when you’re in the business of talking into a microphone and having imperfect voice recognition software convert it into text, and put it immediately on the air, certain precautions need to be taken. All that stuff I said about rhyming monosyllables becomes a liability – the “chef’s pick” of huevos rancheros on your morning lifestyle show must never become the “chef spick”. Also, I mentioned imperfect software – now, when you’re sitting alone in a room and your computer isn’t behaving, what kind of language do you use to work through your frustration? Know, dear reader, that the presence of a hot mic linked to millions of television sets does not make one immune to this kind of reaction.

HELLOOOO. Is it MEEE you’re looking FOOOR?

So there are two possible ways of dealing with the combination of software-generated profanity and human indiscipline. One could manage Dragon’s dictionary, screening out some words so they literally can’t be understood and transcribed. Or one could create a house style which autocorrects by either blanking out the offending words or replacing them with the likely variant (“can’t” is the most obvious here).

The disadvantage of the former is that it fails to pick up anything typed, while permanently hobbling our ability to create uncensored live speech. So onto the house style option – once upon a time, swearing fell under the domain of our company-wide “miscellaneous” house style, which also corrects a number of common errors. As we took on some more adult panel-discussion shows, however, this became unworkable as it meant the ability to swear (by disengaging “miscellaneous”) carried with it the ability to make unnecessary common mistakes.

No, wait, I mean “4, 8, 15, 16…”

So we now have a separate, slimmer swearing house style. When it’s on, swearing gets corrected and elided. When it’s off, Dragon can embrace its inner sailor.

So I mentioned ethical considerations. Inappropriately putting obscenities into the mouths of innocent speakers is only half of that equation. Far more important, in my opinion, is that we don’t patronise our viewers by censoring in translation. I started this post with a look at the potency and elegance of many of these words – the corollary of that is that if they crop up, intentionally or not, in an appropriate context or not, there’s a good chance they’re important. They’re what will drive the water cooler discussions the next day, and will thus be necessary for true accessibility – for caption viewers to fully participate in the cultural life of our society. Live captioners all have “(BLEEP)” programmed in, so we can pass on any network censorship (including dipped or blanked-out words, which aren’t technically a bleep but are expressed as such for simplicity), and I keep “effing” and “N-word” and so on programmed in as folks on prime-time shows sometimes literally say that. But if they don’t, we have a duty of honesty. Also, y’know, a decent percentage of our viewers can lip-read, so condescending censorship might be both irritating and obvious.

Seamless

I might close with an anecdote. I was captioning a late-night stint on a 24-hour news channel. I had my rundown looking pristine, and I’d tidied the previous hour’s interviews, crosses and pre-recorded VTs. My “miscellaneous”, “RC’s personal” and “swearing” house styles were all on, and the newsroom was sticking pretty well to the rundown. The anchor threw to a sequence recorded the previous hour outside Westminster (“earlier our correspondent sent this…”). Then something magical happened. They rolled a tape from the right journalist, in the right location, but the “in-words” (the first words of the package) were subtly different from what I remembered, and from what I’d saved. I started respeaking, while scanning what I had, in case it was merely re-cut. About 20 words in though, the bells for which Big Ben is justly famous began to toll. The journalist let fly a hearty “Fucking hell!” and then stared silently into the camera, waiting for them to finish so he could start again. The silence pretty much became sentient.

It wasn’t live, but an accidentally-rolled out-take, so he had no urgency or contrition, and the anchor was expecting 60 seconds or so of pre-recorded package, and was decidedly unprepared. That was what saved me – an awkward silence in which to dump the text I had prepped for that story, and quickly type in the bells tolling (an unimportant sound which suddenly mattered). But now I had a problem. It takes a few seconds to disengage a house style, and this lovely moment was going to evaporate very soon. Luckily, we’re permitted to distinguish regional accents, provided we don’t go overboard. And I realised that in fact, in my opinion, what he had actually said was “Farkin’ hell!”, which the house style shouldn’t catch. No time for second thoughts, so I typed it and pressed send. In this case a bleep or other self-censored form of the word would have been actively misleading. The whole meaning of this happy accident revolved around a candid, unfiltered moment, a moment when the veil of professionalism was lifted from TV journalism. And who doesn’t love that?

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Disclaimer.

Mishaps and more!

I'm beginning to suspect Dragon of playing a very long con. Maybe it secretly wants us to systematically underestimate its intelligence, to its own shady ends. In any case, its many bewildering mishearings continue to go to air.

Pretty cunning, don't you think?

American military pundits have been a staple of my news diet in the past week. We were told by a slightly folksy analyst that northern Iraq was "more complicated than folks realise." Or as Dragon put it, "Morkel placated Ben Foakes realise". Not to worry, thought I, I shall put in a double dash and quickly redo it. Out came "more combat-ready Ben Foakes". Apparently English right-handed batsman and wicket-keeper Ben Foakes is showing some alarming signs indeed.

More combat-ready Ben Foakes

A discussion of "coordination" of international efforts came out as "cod nation". I can't really see what a republic of fish could offer, but I guess Obama really is open to suggestions right now. The situation, after all, certainly is "Coppola catered" (something might have been Lost In Translation there). Dragon reported regarding IS prisoners that "guards eat them often". Incorrect, but tragically plausible. "Massacres" came out as "Mass occurs", which sort of sounds like the Catholic version of "shit happens", or a blasé attitude to the Higgs boson. Finally, a colleague found that cities being defended by "the Peshmerga" were unexpectedly defended by "Depeche Mode", which - I don't know - maybe English '80s alt-pop will be the key to defeating extremism?

Some tactical keytar, presumably with American air support.

Staying on all things poignant, I was far from the only one among my colleagues to refer to the town of "Ferguson, misery". Police efforts to subdue pro-democracy rioters in Pakistan also made the news - apparently "demonstrators want more Joyce". Unexpected, but Ulysses would certainly keep them all busy. In covering the story, a colleague had the splendid unintentional synecdoche that "thousands of nipple took to Twitter." One can only assume Dragon follows Amanda Palmer. Speaking of police, we heard this week from the "chief comfortable" in charge of finding the missing young English man in Spain. Sounds like a decidedly cushy job.

The weather always offers plenty of giggles, this time "our overall high" came out as "hour of rawhide", which sounds like a rather nightmarish YouTube fan-loop.

Sad to hear of the death of Sir Richard Attenborough, but rather surprised to hear of his memorable role in "drastic park".

What new horror have we wrought?

There's been a bit of talk about Western Australian mining recently, unfortunately two analysts in a row had their intros misconstrued. Firstly, our correspondent joined us "live from birth", and for more in-depth analysis, we cut to the "cheap economist" of a mining investment firm. I suppose economising on economists makes sense as the mining boom shifts. NHS food has been in the spotlight in the UK. We have heard how nurses test the food, but Dragon made it altogether more Millennial by declaring "nurses text the food".

Seriously though, food is awesome and
photographing the best part of your day isn't weird.

Delights too in the sport. First off in cricket, Sri Lanka has been problematical before - this time it popped out as "true languor". And I was captioning tennis, and they suddenly rattled off the half-dozen or so career Grand Slam winners. All went swimmingly until Rod Laver became "Rudd Labor". Not sure he can boast a career Grand Slam per se.

Finally a couple of offline ones. "Little parcels of pasta perfection" sound very appetising. "Little parcels of pastor affection"...do not. On a related note, I just googled "priest pasta" for inspiration and found that there's a type of pasta called "strozzapreti" which translates as "priest strangler". How weird is that? Guess that's one way to achieve pastor affection. And a dog called "Zorro" came out as "the sorrow", which sounds like what pet naming might look like for a very committed emo who is maintaining the rage. "Here, The Sorrow. Come on, boy."

But sometimes when Dragon doesn't know something, it just makes you despair of state of the Dragon education system. Usually Dragon knows the names of movie stars, but I was captioning the film review and my Dragon didn't know Stacy Keach. I now feel this overwhelming desire to invite Dragon over for a video night and teach it a thing or two about character acting.

Here beginneth the lesson.

Before I go, a shout out to a truly amazing Tumblr from a fellow captioner, who happens to do a lot of Judge Judy. http://therulingsarefinal.tumblr.com/ Read and giggle, dear reader. And a bit of industry news - ACMA in Australia have just made an adverse finding against Channel Nine over the caption quality during their cricket coverage. http://www.mediaaccess.org.au/latest_news/news/acma-finds-nine-cricket-coverage-breached-caption-quality-rules Interesting business.