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”).
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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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