I love closed-captioning. I don’t know why, I can hear fine but I just like to have it on. I guess in case I miss a word here or there.
I was watching Pokemon with the closed-captioning on once. There is a Pokemon called Togepi. It’s pronounced with three syllables, To-ge-pi, with a hard G. It was closed-captioned as “Tokepie”. :smack:
Apparently, the poor captioning of Pokémon was satrized on some websites. One of the strangest I remember was an episode in which a song lyric “Pokéball, go, go!” was interpreted by the captioner as “A Pokémon cow, cow!” But there are some particularly strange ones in some episodes of animated shows, especially with names of characters: there’s a Powerpuff Girls where Him is misintepreted as Mim, and (one of my personal favorites) a SpongeBob Squarepants where a character is referred to as Bubble Bath rather than Bubble Bass. Then there’s the Paramount Home Video release of A Charlie Brown Celebration, which has a viewers’ note in the captioning that all adults speak in “whonh” noises and not actual words, and indeed, it is always captioned as “Whonh whonh whonh.” (I’m not sure how they did this on other specials, but it certainly wasn’t like that.)
Captions provide a different service from subtitles. The latter, because they are intended for people who can hear the rest of the sound track (i.e. music and sound effects), typically only reproduce the spoken dialog. Captions provide a visual description of key sounds and an indication of important musical cues. Also, through their positioning, they indicate who is speaking.
Mrs. Seenidog has some experience in this. Although legally blind, she has excellent hearing and can keyboard at well over 60 words per minute. She worked a gig for one student, one class, one semester, doing CC. She had to resign at the end of the semester. The average person speaks at a rate all but a few keyboardists can keep up with. That is why Court reporters are so much in demand and paid so well. They have a form of shorthand that allows them to keep up, but that would be worthless for CC in real time, unless the reciepient understood the short hand (not likely). Mrs Seenidog had to decide what corners to cut. Not knowing the subject matter, her decicions of what to cut where based on nothing, and yet could determine the success or failure of the student. She could not take the stress.
Look at the errors made on the scrolling text on CNN, and that is not even real time. Look at the errors made in news articles in the papers that have alledgedly been run past an editor! I consider myself half way literate, but even having had a chance to review it I am sure several errors are left in this post. Real-time transcription is a tough gig.
Even in movies sacrifices must be made. The recipient is very unlikely to be able to read the full text as fast as the onscreen dialog. If you where to do every word you would be several scenes behind if there were not frequent scenes of silence, even then you would be reading the dialog from a previous scene during scenes of silence.
It is not physically impossible, there are a few people out there who can do it. I have one son who has been on the keyboard since a child who can keyboard at a scarry rate. With a slow computer he can easily over run the keyboard buffer. He can easily key in faster than he can read. But he has no interest is this work, he is quite intent on being behind a TV camera, if you watched the NCAA Wrestling Championships in Iowa this year, you saw some of his work. Not bad for a kid just entering his third year at college. (Okay parental bragging there).
Is there room for improvement? Yes. Is there the incentive for the few talented enough to get into the field? No I predict that VR tech will close the gap, but never, ever will every deaf person be able to read as fast as the person talking on the screen.
As the report that Q.E.D. linked to (and wrote) says,
But even the fastest typists can’t keep it up for more than about 20 or 30 minutes at a time, if that. Hence the use of the court reporter system.
Yeah, “where” for “were” (twice) and “scarry” for “scary,” “half way” should be “half-way” (or “halfway”), and several punctuation errors. 
I’ve noticed that even the subtitles on DVDs aren’t always that accurate- the subtitles for Season One of Futurama are so far off the mark as to be completely useless, IMHO, and I’ve come across similar situations with the subtitles on other TV series- usually comedies, I’ve noticed.
It’s not just TV shows- the subtitling Bedknobs and Broomsticks is worthless in the dinner scene at Eglantine’s house if you want to know what food she’s offering the kids. “Mangelwurzel” becomes “mango wuzzle.” If I hadn’t read Jitterbug Perfume, I wouldn’t have had a clue about what they were trying to say.
I keep the closed captioning as a backup most of the time, and I generally don’t have problems with it. But on AMC’s “Mad Men”, whoever is doing the captions is culturally illiterate, or very young, or both.
For instance, one character asked her therapist if many of his patients were afraid of “the bomb” (the series is set in 1960). The caption had her asking if people were afraid of “the bum”. When a character in a bar toasted with “L’Chaim”, the captioning indicated that he was “Speaking Jewish”. There are plenty more instances, like misspelling the city of Haifa, but I thought those were the worst so far. I’ve decided to be amused instead of outraged.
Within reason. My sister did this for a few years, and because she never got to be too fast of a typer, ended up doing shows that she could spend a little bit of time on, like “Mythbusters” and “Dirty Jobs.”
But she couldn’t keep rewinding the show over and over again until she got it right. They would get the show on its first run anywhere from four hours to one day before air time, and had too have it completed with enough time to transmit the CC track back to whoever sent it to them. And AFAIK, they never got a show back after it aired to correct any errors that made it to the air on the first run.
Just like every other job out there, some people were really good at what they did, and the rest (like my sister) had room for a lot of improvement.
I watched the departed with closed captioning on, and it was flawless. The TV closed captioning is usually terrible, but if you turn on the captioning through your disc menu (I think it’s usually under the “languages” option) instead of through your TV, movies typically have perfect captioning.
Wouldn’t closed captioning that exactly mirrored what was spoken be problematic in that it might not give many people the chance to fully read the dialogue before the box disappears and is replaced by the next one?
Most people don’t have any problem reading faster than the rate of speech. Captioning up here is pretty much verbatim up here, apart from errors - I often resort to it because my girlfriend likes to watch TV at a level that’s just on the threshold of audibility.
Last night I turned it on because I was having trouble making out what some kid on TLC was saying.
As it turned out, she was frequently captioned with stuff like “SPEAKS INDISTINCTLY”. Heh.
Since I’m seeing the terms used interchangeably here, there is a difference between subtitles and closed captioning. Subtitles are found on DVDs and some theatrical presentations and consist of dialogue and narrative elements, such as pertinent signs or writing. Most US viewers see English, French, and Latin American Spanish subtitles in their NTSC DVDs.
Subtitles do not have descriptions such as [speaks inaudibly], because what’s inaudible is almost always not necessary for scene comprehension, and is left untitled. Subtitles will have sound effects like [music] or [gunshot] if they are subtitled for the deaf or hard-of-hearing, but that subtitle track is separate from the normal English subtitle track, usually called English SDH or something like that.
Captions, in my understanding, are entirely via broadcast television. Stylistically, captions are identical to the subtitles for the deaf and hard-of-hearing.
The onscreen durations of subtitles and captions is timed with readability in mind. We have standards for minimum as well as maximum onscreen durations. If the next line of dialogue would cause a subtitle to appear onscreen for too short a time, we’ll combine the subtitles so they appear onscreen longer.