I do feel for the colleague who just spruiked a production of "Pyramus and Frisbee". Can happen to the best of us.
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Tuesday, 29 April 2014
Monday, 28 April 2014
Unheimlich Underground Ennui
Live captioning software has come a long way since 1965. Nice to know this gig puts us in esteemed company!
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Sunday, 27 April 2014
iheartsubtitles
So I'm new to blogging about captioning, but just heard about this phenomenal blog from a viewer's perspective. Particularly like this excellent piece on errors in captioning.
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Disclaimer.
Poem: How To Train Your Dragon
This piece is a kind of textual found-object. I had just captioned a half-hour late-night stint from a 24-hour news channel. Off air, I was combing over my output and teaching Dragon the words and phrases it got wrong, so it would learn for next time. After the session of training my Dragon, I was struck by this strange body of text. It compiled only the words and phrases which had defied easy comprehension, for one reason or another, and then repeated them again and again. There was some context (Dragon learns better with realistic syntax) but never enough. And I wondered whose voice it represented. Mine? My Dragon’s? The newsroom’s? The viewers’?
How To Train Your Dragon
Burned them alive, burned them alive, burned them alive.
Burned them alive, burned them alive, burned them alive.
Burned them alive, burned them alive, burned them alive.
They burned them alive. They burned them alive. They burned them alive.
They burned them alive.
They helped destroy.
Everyone here has a terrifying tale.
Alive, à la.
We have the blessing of Allah. We have Allah's blessing.
We have Allah's blessing. We have the blessing of Allah. Allah.
The Imam tells us this is our last test.
The Imam tells us this is our last test.
The Imam tells us this is our last test.
We await instructions from our Imam.
A large bull elephant.
A look at the morning's newspapers.
A look at the morning's newspapers.
A look at the morning's newspapers.
A look at the morning's newspapers.
A look at the morning's newspapers.
According to rumour,
Francois Hollande. President Hollande.
We listened to so much evidence
we listened to so much evidence.
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Marlee Matlin on captioning
An excellent poster-person for accessibility services - Marlee Matlin talks captioning. Also her earrings are a little bit Dharma Initiative. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/actress-marlee-matlin-touts-closed-captioning-initiative/ Bit of a fail having the program super over the subtitle though. Crowd-sourcing captions though. Innerestin'.
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Disclaimer.
Perfectly Executed Closed Captions
So this post from The Chive, "Perfectly Executed Closed Captions," deserves a mention. It's refreshing to see captioning whimsy emerge from a source other than mishaps, in at least a few of these. Describing non-verbal background cues is a strange little window of creativity for a live captioner. We have some leeway to describe music as we feel is appropriate, and to determine when silence is sufficiently portentous to warrant a mention.
So "screaming like a sissy" might fall foul of what we would consider appropriate gender discourse as broadcasters. But it might be the perfect articulation of the sound if, for example, one character had just demanded of another that they "stop screaming like a sissy".
"Walt Jr. vomiting" may not warrant a mention if we had just seen it happening in a preceding shot, but if the camera lingered on Walt, it might be important to know the sound persists. And whether to call him Walt Jr (I would elide the full-stop as our software tends to read that as the end of a sentence) or Flynn might depend on context.
"Phrase whore" makes me wonder a little. It could be a homophonous name which failed. Or it could be a verbal shortcut which went awry. Perhaps the software misheard "phrase four" which was supposed to be automatically replaced by a specified name. In any case, coarse language house styles should probably pick that up.
"(Dramatic instrumental music)," "(BLOWING SOUND)", "Cat sound", "(silence)", "laughing", "(jazz music playing)", "(sneezes, farts)," "(epic thrash metal)", "(melancholy guitar music)" and "(JOCKS LAUGHING)" each reflect really interesting creative choices by captioners. Whether to include these non-verbal cues and how to describe them is obviously integral to how closed-caption viewers interpret the program. You can see immediately, reading "dramatic instrumental music" contains none of the drama of actually hearing it, but it can still clarify the meaning of the visual information. Louis CK's words really would have less meaning if his syntax was transcribed without his many rhythmical and expressive pause utterances. We see in "laughing" how precisely duplicating onscreen information can become tedious or absurd, a kind of parodic reflection, but clarifying that she isn't screaming may be crucial.
The tennis screencap stretches credibility. For one thing, the sounds of tennis can reasonably be inferred from onscreen information. For another, captioning delay of a couple of seconds can render such pedantic play-by-play description rather meaningless. More on that in future posts about sport captioning.
Thanks also to The Chive for the banner which heads this blog. :)
Disclaimer.
So "screaming like a sissy" might fall foul of what we would consider appropriate gender discourse as broadcasters. But it might be the perfect articulation of the sound if, for example, one character had just demanded of another that they "stop screaming like a sissy".
"Walt Jr. vomiting" may not warrant a mention if we had just seen it happening in a preceding shot, but if the camera lingered on Walt, it might be important to know the sound persists. And whether to call him Walt Jr (I would elide the full-stop as our software tends to read that as the end of a sentence) or Flynn might depend on context.
"Phrase whore" makes me wonder a little. It could be a homophonous name which failed. Or it could be a verbal shortcut which went awry. Perhaps the software misheard "phrase four" which was supposed to be automatically replaced by a specified name. In any case, coarse language house styles should probably pick that up.
"(Dramatic instrumental music)," "(BLOWING SOUND)", "Cat sound", "(silence)", "laughing", "(jazz music playing)", "(sneezes, farts)," "(epic thrash metal)", "(melancholy guitar music)" and "(JOCKS LAUGHING)" each reflect really interesting creative choices by captioners. Whether to include these non-verbal cues and how to describe them is obviously integral to how closed-caption viewers interpret the program. You can see immediately, reading "dramatic instrumental music" contains none of the drama of actually hearing it, but it can still clarify the meaning of the visual information. Louis CK's words really would have less meaning if his syntax was transcribed without his many rhythmical and expressive pause utterances. We see in "laughing" how precisely duplicating onscreen information can become tedious or absurd, a kind of parodic reflection, but clarifying that she isn't screaming may be crucial.
The tennis screencap stretches credibility. For one thing, the sounds of tennis can reasonably be inferred from onscreen information. For another, captioning delay of a couple of seconds can render such pedantic play-by-play description rather meaningless. More on that in future posts about sport captioning.
Thanks also to The Chive for the banner which heads this blog. :)
Disclaimer.
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