Firstly the mishaps. Wars in Iraq and Syria remain extremely fertile ground from which errors can blossom for the unwary respeaker. So I found myself accidentally reporting on "the international hair campaign against Islamic State". Guess David Cameron is really getting serious about split ends. Although I just cancelled this before it could hit the air, it would have been most alarming to report on "the yeti community hiding on Mount Sinjar". Though one would think yetis can pretty much take care of themselves. Less fortunate - I found within a colleague's text logs the brilliant call for "moderate bosoms to condemn these attacks". So unfair how D-cups are never called upon to distance themselves from extremism. And there was something a bit sinister about the military analyst who according to Dragon was proposing (regarding IS) to "nick it in the bath". I rather thought that kind of theft was an urban legend.
In UK news, Lib Dem promises regarding tuition fees have made the news lately. So it was a shame when a colleague had it come out as "Jewish and fierce," which sounds like an uncommonly flamboyant rabbi. And finally a piece on the expansion of one of our clients' catch-up services went awry, when during the intro, "TV fans who missed out" emerged as "TV fancy mister". Which I can only gather looks something like this:
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| We have fun. |
So the first bit of online wonderfulness I came across this week is in a similar vein. Karen Corbel has compiled ridiculously misheard weather captions into a poem. Made me think of the poem I posted earlier from DragonPad corrections. Wonder if anyone else is discovering poetry in live captions?
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| I assume that's how the first draft of Beowulf started. |
Next up, a really interesting New York Times article y'all should read about translation captioning. I can't say a whole lot about that side of things as it isn't my area, but the time-coding aspect is part of what we do in offline captioning. Can be very time-consuming. I feel their pain also on trying to caption Godzilla when the truncated lifespans of the victims mean that sentences never properly end. The same problem occurs (for less satisfying reasons) on the more tabloid of chat shows.
Speaking of things which aren't necessarily my area, I read an interesting piece on the development of the typefaces used for closed captioning. Probably lucky it's not up to me, I'd do Tony Abbott in Comic Sans out of spite.
Last up, some interesting industry politics. Media Access Australia have proposed a shift in captioning requirements for the "multichannels" (ABC2 etc). Currently (though some may exceed requirements) they only have to caption repeats from the primary channel. It essentially means the technology and personnel needed to caption on those channels needs to be maintained, but no new captioning content need be created. MAA proposes a shift to a simpler, more expansive, and more enforceable quota system.
Finally a little bit of news. I mentioned in discussing sport that viewers of scrolling captions need to spend around 88 percent of their time watching the captions, compared with only 67 percent for block captions. I also noted the difficulties in offering block captions live. As I mentioned in discussing news though, there are actually substantial pre-scripted elements in a live news broadcast. Well, for these hybrid-captioning broadcasts, we may soon be able to offer a real-time blend of block and scrolling captions. Once we get our heads around the extra work required, it could be a much smoother experience for our viewers.
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