I was watching CSI on DVD with CC the other night, while I was on the phone. ** When a character had an oral swab done to collect DNA she made a noise. The closed captioning identified the noise as “sensual warble”. I ended my call, and turned up the sound. Sure enough, it was a sensual warble. However there are many ways the sound could have been described. Who makes judgement calls like this one?
**season 3, the episode involving diamonds in a horse’s uterus.
The judgment call is made by the captioner his- or herself. Sometimes you have a script which may be used as a guide, but usually not. If there’s anyone in an editing role, overseeing the work of the captioners, then that person may provide input, or override what the captioner writes. Some of the sound effects put in by captioners may seem silly, but you can appreciate that sounds are often important to the develoment of the plot, and without input in the form of captions, the deaf listener would lose out. And for what it’s worth, the producers of shows rarely care about the content or quality of the closed captions.
When I worked in closed captioning for television, it was a two-part process of me making the editorial decision while transcribing and a more senior member possibly changing it during his review of my script.
Our general rule was to shoot for the lowest-common-denominator and simplest description; so “sensual warble” would most likely become “woman moans” unless the fact that it was particularly sensual was VERY key to further understanding of what was going on.
I got into an argument once with the guy reviewing my script, because I had used “man ululates” and he wanted to substitute “man yells.” It was key to the entire episode that the man was intentionally doing the “alalalalalalallalala”-style “Arab sound” rather than just “yelling,” and I felt that the deaf viewers would have no idea why there was a big stink over the sound if he was just “yelling.”
Thanks you two.
Oh, it was a sensual warble, and key to her character. I should know, I replayed it a dozen times.
A few times I see shows with CC here, and they’re invariably gibberish. Like the captioner is typing after half a bottle of Jack, with one hand, a damaged audio track to transcribe from, and by the way they’re monolingual Swahili speakers. You can kinda get the gist of what they’re saying, but imagine that last line with every third syallable and every other word made up of random and randomly capitolized letters, characters, and symbols. What’s that all about?
Actually, it’s not always that bad. Sometimes it’s reasonably legible, but the spelling, cAPitolizatiON, and div isiono f wor ds makes reading a nice side-entertainment, like a puzzle. These usually have lots of words missing from the translation.
Usually it’s a problem with the decoder in the television - there are several settings that can be adjusted in your TV’s options.
Bad cable signal strength can do that too. Rewire stuff. Toy with it. Hit it with a stick.
I wonder sometimes if script alterations aren’t made for “deaf culture” reasons.
Once, during an episode of The Simpsons (the episode where Lisa isolates “poindextrose”, the chemical that causes bullies to beat up nerds), I had the captions on. Lisa remarks to Marge that there are a lot of important scientists in the audience. “The inventor of the walkie-talkie is out there!” But the captions read, “The inventor of the no-spill mug is out there!” The only reason I can think of for the change is that a “walkie-talkie” is something unfamiliar to or even meaningless to the hearing-impaired. The question remains: who decided to make the change?
Max, what you’re reporting seems like a captioning no-no. Captioners don’t have license to depart from the soundtrack for reasons like that (though it’s not unheard of, for certain markets or customers, to write “f—” instead of “fuck”). My surmise is that you caught an example of a late-stage script change – that the captions were transcribed from a pre-final printed script, or pre-final audio.
Hmm… interesting.
One thing I’ve noticed with simpsons is that there’s one episode - the one where Homer founds his own religion, in which the captions are ALWAYS unsynchronized with the dialog for most of the show, by at least twenty seconds. Probably captioned before some critical cut was made, or a segment added, or both (in different places of the show)??
Has anyone else noticed this one??
Max, what you’re describing is fairly common in shows that run tight deadlines. The show is sent out to the captioner, and then they make some last-minute changes to the audio track. The captioner never sees the change, and you have a mismatch. This most often happens with soundtracks. The editor mixes in a song before securing rights. If they fail to get the rights to the song, they’ll switch at the last minute. If the captioner has already put in the lyrics, you get some entertaining mismatches. CSI seems to do this a lot.
MixieArmadillo, when things are as bad as you describe, it’s almost always the TV reception. A television set is pretty forgiving of bad signals. It can produce a picture that’s not too terribly bad. But the caption information is digital, and is embedded in a specific line of the video signal. If that line is toast in one frame, you lose two letters. If it’s just the wrong frame that’s munged up, the captions will change color, change position, or just go wacky.
vetbridge, the editorial decisions you speak of are almost always with the captioner, although they typically have a set of guidelines for handling sound effects, music, and onomatopoeias.
Hard to imagine that that would apply to an animated show, though. I wouldn’t think it would be very common to do a last-minute rewrite on an animated show, since changing dialogue requires re-recording the voice actor and re-animating the scene to match the new audio. And in this case, they’d have to go to all that trouble for what is really a very minor change.
Wish I knew someone who worked on the show, so that I could find out the straight dope…
I think it would be very common for a minor change… you have the regular voice actors there in the studio working on other episodes while the episode in question is being edited, so there’d be relatively little trouble getting them to do a ‘loop’ or whatever the term is. And they might not bother reanimating the characters’ lips, or they might be drawn ‘facing away from the viewer’ in which case it isn’t relevant. (I seem to remember that in the simpsons example posted - Lisa was looking out of a corner of the stage towards the crowd and we just saw her back at that moment. Or maybe I’m just imagining it.
I would suspect that almost always nobody particularly cares about some editorialization on the part of the captioner. Absent significant complaints, it is a non-issue. Most likely scenario it would be an issue is captioning news broadcasts.
Deaf people can make complaints about closed captioning. I had one woman who called me up to complain repeatedly – but because she was hard of hearing, I couldn’t tell her what was going on! (Why she didn’t have a teletype machine, I don’t know.) It took about a dozen calls before she finally heard me yelling for her address and name so I could write to her about what was happening.
On the shows I work on, we try and fax or email the scripts to the closed captioner. Sometimes they’re able to rip stuff directly from teleprompter.
BUT in live TV, people veer off script all the time, so the closed captioning can be off.
I don’t know of anyone still using Teletypes, although a lot of deaf people have TTY devices (despite the unfortunate abbreviation, the TTYs used by deaf people are not Teletypes).
Max Torque, it definitely applies to animated series. They make last-minute tweaks quite a bit, typically just to the audio. If they changed the animation, it would be a whole different story.
I have a few clients who use TTY (IIRC). We talk via an intermediary. Very awkward situation having a third party privy to the conversation.
And thanks for all the interesting info on CC. I use it a good bit when watching DVDs.
Closed captioning is quite random.
Some movies will put typos over every swear word, and some will just omit them, and some spell them out in full.
And many translations of newscasts run so far behind that you are always look at the next picture. Quite frustrating, really.