In CA Governor Newsom provides a daily update on TV. This appears to be the case in other states with their Governor as well. There seems to always be a signer. Here you can see David Letterman emerged from retirement in Georgia with a new skill.
My question: why is a signer necessary on TV? I get a signer would be needed for an in-person situation, but on TV? Couldn’t they just run the speech across the bottom of the screen, closed caption-style, for the hearing-impaired to read? Maybe it’s easier to read a signer than text? Honest question.
Yes, it is easier to follow an interpreter than a scrawl across the screen.
If the speech is live, or without much delay-- that is, two hours out, as opposed to a prime time show, which has a couple of weeks to polish the captions-- they are usually screwy. Turn them on sometime. Also, if there is ANY audience at all, the event needs to be accessible.
And, I don’t know how the offices are set up, but a lot of places have interpreters on staff now, instead of calling services. If the person is on staff, by all means, have them work.
Also, open captions, which is to say, captions that can’t be turned off, are horribly, horribly unpopular with hearing people.
I think a lot of the time it isn’t necessarily for the TV audience, but rather for the people in the live audience, because as you say, they could just use the closed-captioning, or even publish a transcription after a short time that would be adequate for the hearing impaired.
It is often for the audience who are there at the press conference.
But yeah, many hearing impaired have told me that they can get ASL faster and with more meaning than closed captioning. A good signer can impart emotion also.
Mind you, many say they like both, just as I like sound on and closed captioning.
Just so people know, the term “hearing-impaired” is not popular among people who use American Sign Language as their daily language. They by far prefer Deaf. With a capital “D.”
If anyone wants to argue the point, I can give you the address of Gallaudet University, or the National Association of the Deaf.
How far behind would close captioning lag? ASL interpretation seems to run in more or less real time, like interpretation at the UN.
This morning Gavin Newsom went into an aside about fishing. (Shows you that we in California are in good shape, relatively speaking.) The interpreter was on the verge of cracking up. We got to see the sign for fishing also. So I suspect a lot of the speech is not prewritten.
As RivkahChaya notes, real-time captioning can be very hit-and-miss, as well as lagging by a number of seconds. Turn on the closed captioning for a football game, and you’ll see a lot of incorrect words, and sometimes just nonsense words, particularly for proper names. I don’t envy the job of real-time captioners at all.
Is that right? I thought Deaf was a cultural identifier which a deaf person may or may not consider themselves a member of. Perhaps many or most identify with being Deaf, but that is independent of them being deaf. Any given deaf person might not appreciate being assumed to be a member of the Deaf community (or rather, one of the many Deaf communities).
Reading RivkahChaya’s post more closely, I see she was specific about people that use ASL as a *daily *language (as opposed to someone who knows ASL as an occasional language or not at all). That probably is a decent proxy for being Deaf. Many communities are united by a common language, and it would be hard to learn ASL without some degree of community membership. People who became deaf late in life aren’t likely to learn ASL and thus wouldn’t be using signers.
This, and sign language can be “spoken” faster than spoken English, so there are few issues with keeping up unless a lot of words have to be spelled out.
So? Change is the only constant in life. I think what you meant to say was “thank you for helping me stay abreast of current usage, that was kind of you.”
Because ASL and English are different languages. If someone is fluent in ASL, and it’s their main language, then they can follow that a lot more easily than reading English. The way it’s different to other languages (like Spanish), when it comes to live events, is that it can be translated at the same time as the speaker is talking without drowning the original speaker out.
For conferences like this, it also means that deaf people in the room can keep up with what’s going on.
Just for fun, I turned on “closed captioning” yesterday, and watched several programs using this. I found that a program that was not filmed live, but instead had been filmed prior to broadcasting, the closed captioning was OK. However, if any program was live, the closed captioning had a two or three second delay which was very annoying.
And sometimes the translation from the verbal to the captioning was what one would get with an instruction manual that had been from translated from Japanese to English by a Japanese speaker.
I’m hearing-impaired Generally, I can’t hear what you are saying unless I can see what your lips are doing. I can’t sign, so I prefer captions. The live programa I watch every week are live-captioned, and they do a good job of it. (I can hear the dialog if I turn the volume right up: I can tell what you are saying if you shout at me). The live captioning is actually better that what I see on movies (where the text often doesn’t match the dialog), except when conversations are happening too fast: the captioning can keep up with a single speaker, because of speech pauses, but when a second speaker breaks in the continuous flow can be too fast. These are studio programs. There is delay, not 2 or 3 seconds, but enough so that you want to either read or listen, not both at once (I can’t understand them much anyway, so I just ignore the sound, like watching a captioned French movie).
I assume that press conferences just haven’t set up the infrastructure for live captioning, and find it easier/cheaper and more politically attractive to use signing instead. I don’t know what the audience figures are for hearing-impaired people like me, compared to deaf people, but I can see the importance that politicians place on their surrounding supporting cast. They clearly think that it is politically valuable to have signing on stage.
Unlike the USA, this is a new thing in Australia, where I live. It only really became common with the Australian bush fires at the end of last year, and suddenly everybody is doing it. I’m happy for the local deaf community, but deeply cynical.
And I’m quite sure you don’t comprehend in the slightest why what you just wrote is incredibly tone deaf (heh heh) and demonstrates how profoundly you misunderstood RivkahChaya’s post. Quelle surprise.
Generally, I can’t hear what you are saying unless I can see what your lips are doing. I can’t sign, so I prefer captions. The live programa I watch every week are live-captioned, and they do a good job of it. (I can hear the dialog if I turn the volume right up: I can tell what you are saying if you shout at me). The live captioning is actually better that what I see on movies (where the text often doesn’t match the dialog), except when conversations are happening too fast: the captioning can keep up with a single speaker, because of speech pauses, but when a second speaker breaks in the continuous flow can be too fast. These are studio programs. There is delay, not 2 or 3 seconds, but enough so that you want to either read or listen, not both at once (I can’t understand them much anyway, so I just ignore the sound, like watching a captioned French movie).