Failure to Communicate

So the Senate Committee Report into captioning reform in Australia has been squeezed out. To the surprise only of those who think the world is comprised of caring and fundamentally good people trying to do the right thing, the report is a snivelling apologia for the broadcast industry, the committee politely rolling over, licking their pointy boots, thanking them for its beatings (how else will it learn?) and asking polite permission to be allowed to please put the lotion on its skin.

Right away, Rupert.

It breezes right the fuck past all submissions from consumer groups. Weirdly it quotes them, provides no particular counter-arguments, then decrees whatever free ride the broadcasters were going to get anyway. I’m not going to go through it in detail, because honestly it’s too inane and that’s an exercise that would endumben us both. But for a sampler, the Minister (a man more renowned for Not Being Leader and for an admittedly fabulous leather jacket than for any particular intellect) concludes that:

I want to make it quite clear that broadcasting licensees will still be required to meet the same specified level of captioning for television programs to assist viewers with hearing impairment.

Now I don’t want to give you a sense of déjà vu, learned reader, but I went into some detail about how that was not actually, in the tangible world to which we are confined, the case. As a random sample, the ability to average the captioning output across linked sports channels (a measure which in overseas markets has led to reduced output), a get-out-of-jail clause for technical faults (news flash – the regulated free market can incentivise really clever measures to reduce those technical faults), the expanded exemptions for new channels (such a missed opportunity to build captions into the foundations) and the reduced standards for live captions (keep me honest, ffs!), ALL represent a drop in the Minister’s “specified level of captioning”.

Ah, but in your coat pocket...your card!

…But I don’t want to retread old ground. Indeed, here would be the point, in a well-conducted public debate, where I look at the rebuttals to points such as mine*, develop my defences for that which remains defensible, and abandon that which is not. But there’s very little scope for it. The views of the deaf fell on deaf ears, while erstwhile bastions of fairness among the ranks of broadcasters, like ABC and SBS, proved fair-weather friends. Arguments such as mine were raised in the same way that a budgie smuggled into a coal mine squawks about climate change – unheard, disregarded, directly inactive and dead on arrival. They were not engaged with, but instead placed side-by-side with the submissions of the Grown-Ups and talked past, as if tacitly admonished to run along and play outside.

* In fact, not only were my arguments mirrored in many submissions to the committee, my own words were quoted as part of one group’s submission, so the debate is discombobulatingly direct.

If there is one new argument to be made, it is this. The requirement for consumers to report, rather than broadcasters to annually self-report, was justified on the basis that between 6:00am and midnight, primary channels require 100% captioning, so it’s “easy” for consumers to see when it’s erroneously missing. That argument holds some water. Not enough, but some. But that exact reasoning constitutes a really good reason why averaging of captioning quotas on sport channels is a bad idea. The committee effectively acknowledges that reliable captioning quotas are the easiest kind for consumers to help enforce. Fair enough. Well, then the committee specifically endorses making it harder to report captioning problems on sport channels, because there that reliability gives way to “flexibility” (to offer less, of course – Murdoch’s sport networks already have the flexibility to exceed requirements).

He’s a flexible guy.

We also apparently have “no evidence” that viewers will be less effective at enforcing compliance than comprehensive industry record-keeping. Whereas, you see, we have lots of evidence from broadcasters that it will reduce the regulatory burden. That sound you can hear is a captioner screaming something about unequal consultation, in the darkness, after finding himself tragically unable to shake shake shake it off.

Must highlight this little gem:

The committee agrees that the breadth of consultation in relation to this bill has been insufficient. As a consequence, the effect of some proposed amendments appear to have been misunderstood…

Catch that? Consultation was too short. Not, however, because of any shortcoming in gathering the views of stakeholders and forming a broad consensus model for the legislation. No, “consultation” here means unilaterally talking, and too little consultation means they haven’t browbeaten people sufficiently into submission. For the record, my colleagues, my viewers and I understand. We do. We can’t help but notice it’s just a bit shithouse, is all.

It should be noted the committee represented the depressing bipartisanship for which our Senate is of course so celebrated. Which is to say, weak-as-piss Labor rubber stamping. The committee consists of three Coalition Senators, two Labor and one Green, along with two further Greens listed as “participating members for this inquiry”. The Greens issued a strong dissenting report, calling for a host of sensible amendments and rejecting large parts of what must, therefore, have otherwise been a consensus view (between Rupert Murdoch and his navel).

Bipartisanship.

So what do we do now? Well, unless I’m misreading it, the marginally amended bill still needs to pass the Senate, so if you hear of any Labor Senators ambling in the direction of Damascus, consider rigging up some extra-flashy pyrotechnics and a generous supply of peyote. And if and when we lose, keep on fighting in the form of complaints. Whether you’re a viewer or even a captioner (why not?), complain officially about every error you see, every loss, every time we cover up important information, every program or channel or instant without comprehensive captions. If it falls to you to enforce compliance, do it mercilessly. Don’t ask yourself whether it was a reasonable live error, whether it was a show which maybe didn’t require captions, if it was a technical hiccup at the network. Register every complaint. Don’t feel sorry for captioners. Keeping us honest makes us do better work, and more importantly makes our clients and employers provide us the resources to do better work. We’re on your side, so punish us good.

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Miss Happens

You know, there has been some weird reporting about live captions lately. The regulator Ofcom in the UK are being reported in various tabloids as suggesting that lots of captioning errors make captions harder to understand. In other news, the sky is suspected of being blue, the Pope showing signs of leaning towards Catholicism and not all bears fully utilise available public restrooms. I’m willing to assume the tabloids buried the lede somewhere and Ofcom went into more detail about error rates, delays, losses and such, which are the nuts and bolts of caption quality, but the tabloid reports seem to leave it at errors=bad, which is a no-brainer. The Mirror at least takes a whimsical approach to it, using errors=bad as a springboard to segue into a compiled listicle of funny mishaps. But the Sunday Express went bewilderingly fire-and-brimstone with it, using what appeared to be around four errors (ironically enough during a discussion of accessibility services) as a cudgel to attack the BBC, without the slightest discussion of what live captioning involves, or what is an acceptable error rate. They suggest that “Western Mark there is an answer” emerged where the caption should have just read “enough”, which I find pretty implausible because I recognise some of the brushwork. “Western Mark” is definitely an unlucky side-effect of that captioner, whoever they may be, saying “question mark”. I’m guessing the “an answer” part was a mishearing, whether human or software, of “enough”. As for “there is”, two possibilities are equally likely. Either they said it, and the Sunday Express had an uncharacteristic lapse in their usually stellar journalistic thoroughness, or they didn’t say it and it was added in an attempt (futile though it may have been) to trigger their voice software’s syntactical context-recognition. “There is enough…” is less likely to be misheard than simply “Enough”. Anyway, as I’ve said before, we’re in the business of the inexact. An error every minute is great, an error every two minutes makes you that Jedi-on-amphetamines captioner who we all hate a little bit, and if they think three or four errors is newsworthy, then boy howdy do I have some scoops for them.

On with the mishaps! In the lead-up to BAFTAs and Oscars and such, there’s been some tricky film chatter to caption. I know it’s a cliché to joke about his bafflingly homophonous name, but there was a strange, naughty, zeitgeisty joy in realising “an addict Cumberbatch” had gone to air. An award recipient wanted to “thank these gorges, gorgeous women,” because cliff faces are the true unsung heroes of the film industry. The Clint Eastwood classic Letters From Iwo Jima has a certain stoic profundity. “Letters from your Gmail”… does not. Finally, “a noir writer” emerged as “on a wire writer”, which has a nice kind of poetry.

There’s always a little bit of gambling when place names come up unexpectedly. Dragon has a large native database of place names, and we’ve all added reasonably comprehensive wordlists for the places our captions go to air. Still, there’s always a few in need of refinement. Thus we had “pill bra”, which sounds less like an Australian mining region and more like a place you stash your ecstasy so the bouncer won’t find it. Similarly I’m not sure “Albury wood donger” is a real place. Nor are countries spared, with Guatemala finding its way to air as “quite a Mahler”.

Quite.

Politics also remains a source of endless hilarity, and not just in terms of entertaining “captain’s calls”. Who knows what permutation may govern in coalition in the next UK parliament, but I hope no-one sides with the “glib dams” – their arguments, while pithy, don’t hold water. The NHS has been a hot political topic, but while increasing funding for NHS Blood and Transplant sounds like sound policy, “NHS Lard and Transplant” sounds like a Menulog regret waiting to happen. Voting “by conscience” seems laudable; voting “icon sheds” seems incomprehensible. One politician speaking “in relation to debt” spoke instead about “immolation debt”. And here’s me thinking setting fire to stuff isn’t all that pricey. And politics intruded unwonted when a visit to a toy fair became a visit to a “Tory affair”. Political adversaries became political “at the ferries”, which sounds altogether more pleasant. A colleague’s unfortunate pause made Indonesia’s leader “President Joker”. I guess we all appreciate the success of three-word slogans in politics, like “Yes we can” and “Stop the boats,” so I feel “Kill the Batman” is in with a shot. And I had Syria’s leader down as “resident aside”, which I guess given the displaced people in that area isn’t so much funny as not funny.

The owls are not what they seem.

Nature documentaries – still fun. Usually there’s time to nix these before they go to air, as they’re captioned offline, but they give me a guffaw in my booth. So only I got to see that instead of “our aquatic friends,” the humble fish became “power quantic friends”. And an expert, when asked how fast crocodiles grow, apparently replied “Well, it depends what they’re reading.” Finnegan’s Wake is, I grant, a challenge to digest. “Wobbegong” is a fun word at the best of times, but Dragon decided “wobbly goal” was a better fit.

Don’t let it get the best of you.

Captioning church remains an error-spotter’s delight. “Liquid myrrh”, admittedly an obscure phrase, came out as “liquid murder”, which would have made for an undeniably more badass (if less pretty smelling) Messiah. And while “coheirs to eternal life” has a stronger scriptural foundation, “co-eds to eternal life” sounds like more fun.

Forgive me.

The gravitas and dignity of history makes captioning errors in historical features all the more starkly silly. Thus I could only giggle as one colleague marked 10 years since a “50-foot salami” buffeted South-East Asia. And again when combat veterans were said to be suffering from “post-dramatic stress” (I guess they method). And I could only gasp, then giggle as another colleague, in a feature on Auschwitz survivors, made the classic “I scream”/”Ice-cream” switcheroo.

Finally, a couple of random mishaps from lifestyle shows. Recreational archery is made decidedly more challenging when the apparatus becomes “bow and error”. The trade-off between cardiovascular fitness and fun seemed reasonable when “aerobic routine” became “erotic routine”. The tips on where an eligible young gentleman can find the best “rattler pad” may come in handy if I want to have my snake bros over to play X-Box. A celebrity was described as being “no shrieking violet,” which is a good thing as that sounds abjectly terrifying. A sport analyst saying “I sense optimism” unintentionally reaffirmed his commitment to Sparkle Motion when it came out as “ice dance optimism”. “Be with you in a sec” and “be with you in a sack” are two very, very different things. And an interactive segment opening with “we’re back to hear all your thoughts” emerged as “wear bacterial thoughts”.

And that, tabloids, is how you make some gosh darn captioning errors. Just a couple of last things before I go. I mentioned the proposed changes to captioning regulation. Well now there is an opportunity to comment on Australia’s captioning regulations. Go do that! And I’ve talked about how much more smoothly the captioning process goes when you’re part of the process rather than an afterthought. This was recently explored in much more detail in a post on iheartsubtitles. And finally, another interesting post on the educational benefits of closed captions. They… uh, exist.

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