This is why I always watch Simpsons with the captions on. Sometimes there are completely different jokes!
Do not want!
I dunno. I had an online acquaintance who did closed captioning work as of less than a year ago, though she recently quit.
One interesting thing is how little she could talk about her work. She could discuss some things that happened, but she had to be very cagey about what she actually worked on until it actually came out. Not just avoiding spoilers, but mentioning she worked on the series at all.
I also learned that each person gets a small section, without a lot of context, which explains a lot of errors. And that there are specialists who get stuff with a lot of foreign languages, while she was required to just say “[foreign language]” if it came up for her.
She’s friends in real life with people I know and trust, so I’m pretty sure this is all on the up and up.
I do note we can see machine captioning in action on YouTube. I notice it can’t punctuate, and makes mistakes of a kind that don’t show up on TV shows. The mistakes I see on TV tend to make sense on their own, while YouTube may produce some gibberish.
I do know that people who caption on YouTube definitely use the machine version as a base if at all possible. So I bet a lot of stuff is machine aided. I also know, however, how bad YouTube can be if there’s any background noise. Stuff like podcasts and info videos work better than actual filmed scenes of life. With that stuff, it’s probably better to start from scratch.
I know the acquaintance above said she didn’t get a machine transcription.
On the opposite end of things, I was recently watching the original Mad Max on DVD, and the subtitles were great. They must have been using the script, or something like that, because they caught all the dialogue, even muffled or unclear things. And it was all accurate, as far as I could tell.
On the episode of Star Trek: Discovery where Burham got shown around the ship the captions indicate that the ship can perform hundreds of discreet projects at the same time. This makes my think of some very very quiet scientists.
Could you ask her about the rules for “foreign” and “native” language? Because it seems to be based solely and the amount of pigment in the speakers’ skin. I find it offensive.
I do captioning as a part time gig. We have a key in code that prints “other language”
I like to watch Japanese anime, so I see a lot of subtitled stuff. The quality variance between supposedly professional work by large companies is astonishing. Amazon Prime Video’s quality is by far the worst overall. In one series, I managed to find a character’s name was translated in four different incorrect ways. This was especially embarrassing because the character’s name was the English word “Reinforce”, or “Rein” for short. The morons doing the subtitles managed to spell that as “Gin”, “Lein”, “Re-enforce” and my personal favourite, “Rain Force”.
In that same series, there are these weapons that speak little bits of English from now and then, with the voice actors being native English speakers who are perfectly understandable. And yet these idiots have managed to make errors like “cythe foam” for “scythe form” or “ark saver” for “arc saber”.
Needless to say, I’m desperately hoping that Amazon’s little foray into anime licensing dies a quick death.
some time ago, and I don’t recall the source, a relative in Brazil told me about attending a showing of a war film there. It was English or American, subtitled in French (and Portuguese?). Two men were in a WWII bunker, one keeping watch. He suddenly said “Tanks!”, and the subtitle read “Merci!”
You know, I think I’m talking about subtitles, not closed captions.
The limitations and shortcomings of closed captioning become most apparent when one watches talking head shows where surly politicos constantly interrupt one another. You’re lucky to get 50% of what gets said in print.
Dude, maybe they were under the influence of LSD?
I was reading a different article on this site just now and this article showed up in the right-hand panel of suggested videos. Perfect for this thread.
I’m fairly certain I’ve seen cases where a minor curse word is bleeped but is shown in the closed captioning.
During a Nationals/Mets game this season, the closed-captioning on the Nationals’ TV network, MASN, misspelled the name of pitcher Noah Syndergaard. Oh, they got his impossible-to-spell last name correctly. But they misspelled his first name, which was in The Bible, as “Know-Ah”. I thought that was funnier than hell.
Another sort of error I’ve seen is when news shows are showing archival clips (like, say, they’re comparing some person/organization’s response to a current event to their response to an event earlier in the year). The audio is the talking-head talking about how it relates to the current news, but the closed captions are still the original ones from the first time the clip aired.
Seriously? Like the captions would say “And Best in Show goes to the ****er Spaniel?”
'Cause that’s messed up.
zomg, the captioner put in TWO r’s instead of one? What a moron!!
(Really, it’s okay to admit that you were just wrong about the captioner not knowing a Ford from a Panzer)
It is the Svaginahorpe problem.