Democracy in Hong Kong was the first cab off the rank this month. While Mong Kok may one day go down in history as the birthplace of Chinese democracy, “mong cock” as occasionally offered by Dragon might require a visit to the chemist and some awkward phone calls to former lovers. In a similarly intimate vein, the Gospels could certainly have been more fun if Jesus’ prophecy to Peter had climaxed when “the cock grows three times”, as Dragon inferred. Couldn’t help thinking of the Grinch’s condition.
It’s nice to see sophistry named for what it is in political debates, but Dragon decided Nigel Farage rather has to answer for his “soap history” – I guess no man should know that much about EastEnders. Farage also had plenty to say about EU bureaucracy – but since Dragon seems to kind of like paperwork, the captions instead offered “you rock receipt”. On the subject of UKIP, it was suggested we could “see coalitions” forming. Unfortunately, captions viewers were treated to the rather incomprehensible “sequel ocean is”. Personally, I didn’t think the Oceans sequels were so crash hot. Clooney kind of phoned them in.
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| And then I say “She looks like Julia Roberts.” Hilarious. |
A random netball allocation provided some unintended entertainment. “Sweet netballing moves”, which is a valid if slightly vague observation about the state of play, was unfortunately captioned as “sweet and appalling moves”. Also instead of players who “wear bibs”, we had players who “wet beards”. Which to me sounds like a rather different game.
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| A dark, dark game. |
Nature documentaries continue to provide counter-intuitive captioning fun. A particularly biodiverse environment was described as having a “huge variety” of birds. Unfortunately Dragon preferred “huge pariah tee” which sounds more like a controversial extra-large shirt. I laughed too at the lethargic pedagogy implied by “Galapagos taught us”. Taught us what? We may never know. Bunny domiciles were referred to as “rabbit warrants”, and I was heartened to hear those cotton-tailed homeowners knew their rights when the adorable rabbit cops came a-knocking. The rainforest canopy, we learned, offers woodland creatures the odd “shady brunch”. I can only infer surreptitious eggs benedicts and bootleg flat whites. Ducks took a turn for the emo, apparently having “wept feet”, and sparrows had their hip hop dreams dashed, due to having a “cracker-type beat” with which to eat their nuts and grains and so forth. And a wombat was referred to as a “big boy” by his handler, which is a fair observation. But Dragon took it in a very nihilistic direction, making him a “big void”.
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| Negative-space wombats next 5km. |
Russian diplomacy remains a constant menace in the news. It perhaps doesn’t help when “in principle” support becomes “end printable support”. Those printouts could prove to be important. I did enjoy watching “Putin’s tirade” become “Putin’s Thai raid” though. When the man badly needs a chicken laksa…well, too bad for Ukraine I guess.
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| He may also enjoy French Canadian hangover food. |
Usually Dragon is really good at context. But I’ve had problems before with countdowns. This time, we saw “Three, two, wine…” Hard to argue with his initiative.
Islamic State keep on making the news. Or more pedantically, “so-called Islamic State”. Awful, really. But it did make me laugh when Dragon rendered it “is Linux 8”. That wily OS.
Ebola is also still in the news, with Dragon unfortunately choosing to focus rather superficially on the fashion. Thus instead of “a full hazmat suit” we had “a fall hazmat suit”, presumably distinguished by a flirty off-the-shoulder hermetically sealed cardigan. And while international aid agencies need people who “can coordinate” their response, when captioned as “camcorder mate” it becomes that one guy who likes to record himself jumping off stuff and put it on YouTube. Presumably his heroic moment will come.
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| Immortality beckons. |
Sometimes there’s a very fine line between right and wrong. Case in point: “children’s supply business” becomes “children supply business”. One makes toys, the other gets you on a watch list.
Sometimes it’s the simplest lines which go awry. Thus “there it is” became “buried as”, which turned an innocuous statement into a Kiwi synopsis of Kill Bill 2.
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| Buried as, bro. |
Dragon keeps trying to convince me Indigenous Australians threw “returning meringues”. Who am I to disagree?
It was unfortunate when a character on a soap called “Evie” was named in a caption as “easy”. Not because it was wrong, but because spoilers!
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| Easy, let your hair hang down. |
Dragon tried to convince viewers there was such a thing as “Barack architecture”. I wonder what that would look like?
This one was an offline file, so I had time to correct, and I knew I might need it. The presenter was talking like a pirate, and I figured I’d try my luck. For the record “me hearties” is interpreted by Dragon as “many parties”. I love how dogeish that sounds.
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| Wow. |
Finally one from an overseas colleague, which apparently went to air during the news. “His Holiness the Pope” came out as “His whole penis the Pope.” ‘Nuff said.
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| “And then I said, consider it a Papal endowment!!” |
Just to finish with, a few interesting things from the captioning world. This sketch on captioning beautifully demonstrates the problems which remain in unmediated voice recognition software. This paper on caption placement concisely analyses some excellent data on where our eyes tend to look while watching the captions. This BBC America ad for closed captions made me laugh. And this blog post on the choices we make as live captioners was well worth a read. Try as we might to be invisible and to translate faithfully, we always impose our own perspective.
Oh yeah, and after my last post decrying the unfortunate changes to captioning laws which were suggested by the Australian Federal Government, some good news. The changes were deferred, pending further input. I’m hopeful that means that now the changes won’t simply be waved through without resistance. Viewers, captioners and content creators have noticed – just in the nick of time.
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