Hmm, while this is exactly the kind of translation errors stenographers make, I’ve having a hard time making this conflict out. I mean, “solitude” would most likely be SOL/TUD or SOL/TAOUD. I can’t come up with any steno for OBL that would be in any way close to that. A misstroke of SAM for SOL, just maybe, but where does it go from there?
Does anyone else here read steno?
That’s because KCUR’s Kim Noble was doing the captioning. Spell it like you say it, after all. “It’s uh guh-LOR-e-uss fifty six degrees he-ah in KAHN-sus Ci-TAH, and Talk of thuh Nat-shi-un is coming up next … fah fah fah.”
Anyone recall the infamous Niger Innis incident?
“Boooop booooop beeeep…The fingers you have used to dial are too fat. To obtain a special dialing wand, mash the keypad with your palm now…”
Maybe they have a key set aside specifically to type “Osama Bin Laden”, like a macro, since he’s been in the news so much that they must have to type his name pretty often. So one wrong keystroke could insert “Osama Bin Laden” into the output.
It wasn’t me, I swear.
Sure- if it was me, I’d do SAM/BIN, BIN/LAUD, or probably OBL/OBL. It’s a relatively long name; I’d expect most people would make it two strokes in any event.
Of course, everyone does it differently; perhaps I shouldn’t be assuming this particular captioner was doing something that would make sense to me…
CORE spokesman’s name rendered as `Nigger Innis.’
I, too, figured it was speech-to-text software. Apparently, it isn’t.
My mom does. I checked with her and this was her response:
"My guess is that whoever it is is a majorly short writer and maybe writes all her -tude words with a D or TD (SOL(T)D) (you could still write ‘sold,’ which could otherwise be a conflict, by using the long O, SOELD) and that at some time she had defined Osama Bin Laden as SABLD (otherwise, you would write OE/SAM (or SOM) /A/BIN/LAD (or LOD)/ IN, which is way too many strokes) and then misstroked A for O (which is easy since they’re right next to each other and on the same side).
Or she could even have defined OBL as SOBLD. I’m sure I could think of other ways to have one come out as the other, but they all involve misstroking. Solitude is not a high-frequency word – and lately OBL is. I agree with her stroking for ‘solitude’ IF the writer is writing everything out, but I’d be willing to bet that NOBODY is writing out Osama Bin Laden."
I thought it was done the same way a lot of court reporters work, with a machine where you turn out whole syllables at a time. I took some classes in it. It’s a WHOLE lot faster than regular typing. But judging from the captioning I’ve seen, either that’s not what they’re doing, or they’re hiring reporting class dropouts.
And here I opened this expecting a rant about a stupid car commercial. “Buy a Lexus and learn what Lexyourious means!”
OK, I’m done now. I’ll be quiet.
Hehe.
I was watching a DVD, using subtitles (US: closed captioning?), in which one of the characters was French. He was in the background of the scene, ordering something in a cafe, (while there was a lull in the conversation btw characters at a table in the foreground) The caption for this was (Speaks French)
There’s a very odd one when the Simpsons visit the Knowledgeum, which i’ve spent many a lonely night pondering the meaning of…
Bart’s Line: “I’m going to toss the virtual salad.”
Closed captioning: “I’m going to toss the invisible Frenchman.”
The frist time I saw this thread’s title, I thought it heralded the entrance of a new word into our lexicon.
How wrong I was.
How is your reception on the Simpsons? Sometimes, if the reception isn’t just right on my TV, the captions come out garbled like that. Adjust the antenna, and the captions are fine again. Apparently, if the signal isn’t just right, the caption decoder decodes the captions differently.
Also, if you tape shows using an old, used-over-and-over videotape, the captions can be garbled or lost.
Tamex, you have an image in your sig? I didn’t know we could do that!
Rilchiam, I thought the same thing. But some mouse-overing makes me think it’s a character in one of of those crazy-hippie fonts.
auntie em, thanks for that article; I often watch CNN with captioning at work and had wondered if it were voice-recognition software or what.
For a Pit thread, this turned out pretty instructive.
From auntie em’s link, it appears that they use exactly those machines, linked through a computer database to translate the syllables into words again. That’s where the problems arise, many words are similar, or not in the dictionary at all, so they get screwed up. Having a human read the compressed data works better because we can put it into context that the computer can’t.
Hey, I know what you mean about those closed captioning mistakes auntie em–it really gets on my nerves too!
I was watching a movie with my mom and sis and someone in the movie used the word “criminitly(sp?)” but closed captioning rendered this as “crime in Italy!” To this we could only say 
OTOH, I once saw a movie scene in which someone had to pass gas and the closed captioning simply said “farting.” You GOTTA love that! 