I have absolutely no idea how I missed this thread three years ago, but if anyone involved still has questions, please feel free to ask them.
Yes, I’ve written three books about the subject, so I can hopefully be of some help.
ETA: Oh, and just for the record, Everybody Poops is not my series. Who Pooped in the Park? is my series. I just finished checking the rough-draft artwork for my 18th Who Pooped? book, which should be out this fall.
One thing that has attracted me to the CC area is the lack of accuracy i encounter when watching programs myself. Perhaps this led me to wrongly assume that there is a shortage of workers in the field. It may be that quality, or in this case accuracy expectations specifically, varies across employers. Any thoughts?
Ditto! It often seems clear to me that they simply take the script and use that for the captioning, totally unchanged, without making the slightest attempt to reconcile it with what is actually broadcast. For example, an actor might make a tiny change, adding just one or two words that make zero change to the story, and no one corrects the captions. I would love to know why this happens.
The problem, in my humble opinion, is that the people who pay for the service (TV networks) are not the ones who actually use it. This means that they always take the low bid instead of choosing the highest quality captioning firms. There are plenty of good realtime captioners, but they are getting paid half of what they were paid ten years ago and they’re competing against untrained, unqualified low bidders who keep landing the contracts.
At one point, a bunch of us were lobbying the FCC quite heavily to institute quality standards for captioning, which would have helped immensely, but they refused to get involved in something they viewed as subjective and hard to quantify.
Here’s a good example of what I mean. I am watching an old episode of The Golden Girls, and one character just said, “She’ll be here in a few minutes to help me.” But the captions said, “She’s coming to help me.”
If it was a spelling error, it would be easy to blame it on the low-wage employees. But this sort of inconsistency makes it look like the trascriber wasn’t even listening to the soundtrack. Am I wrong?
Often they are not listening to the soundtrack: they work from the script. So if the actors changed any bits, the written and spoken parts don’t match (I may still have somewhere the project where I compared several sets of subtitles with the spoken soundtracks and the original script, for the pilot of Desperate Housewives). Also, there is the matter of fitting the speech into the screen for specific amounts of time: each written line has to remain on-screen for a given amount of time which assumes “average to slow reading speeds”.
In that specific case of multiple-language subtitles, and simply tracking changes:
I can certainly see how starting off with the script is a great time-saver, giving you a 90% head-start on the project. The part I’ve had trouble with is why the English subtitler wouldn’t spend some extra time to make corrections from the soundtrack. (I estimate this would take about double the length of the show: once to listen and catch the differences, and then some time to make the changes.) I know that time costs money, but would this be a significant increase over the time that it already takes?
Side point: Can I presume that “HOH English” refers to “Hard of Hearing”? How is that different from “regular English”?
I have noticed that many DVDs list the captioning options like this:[ul][li]English[/li][li]Espanol[/li][li]Francais[/li][/ul]while others have it like this:[ul][li]English for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing[/li][li]Espanol[/li][li]Francais[/li][/ul]and I’ve been curious if there’s any difference between the two.
Because they do not have access to it. It is not available. The subtitlers can not use information they do not possess, as they start working before the movie is finished/dubbed. Doing it the way you say would increase total production times, good luck with that. It would also involve sending out copies of the finished material before it was released: in general, the response to that is “hell to the no”.
Yes, HOH is hard of hearing. For English, HOH differs from regular subtitles in that it’s based on the actual finished footage and in that it includes information about sounds other than speech (pistol being shot romantic music). It’s different for other languages: any subtitles produced according to the Spanish Subtitling Standard have to include non-spoken sounds and follow a series of rules about color (different colors for different speakers), formats, etc which are not regulated in other countries.
This is a controversial topic in the closed captioning world. The verbatim camp (including me) says that Deaf/HoH viewers should see everything that the rest of the viewers hear. The two obvious exceptions are captioning for children, who may not be able to keep up, and realtime captioning with no prepared script, especially when two people are speaking at once and it’s impossible for the captioner to write verbatim.
The editing camp believes that since English is a second language for many deaf/Deaf viewers and some HoH viewers, they cannot be expected to read fast enough to follow verbatim captions.
Terminology used in the Deaf/HoH community:
“Big-D” Deaf means prelingually deaf: people who were deaf since birth or lost their hearing before they learned to speak. For most Deaf people, their first language is ASL (American Sign Language) or SEE (Signed Exact English).
“Small-D” deaf means postlingually deaf: people who lost their hearing after developing speech.
“HoH” is Hard-of-Hearing: people who have some hearing, but not enough to reliably follow conversation.
There are two primary differences.
Nava mentioned sound effects. Regular subtitles assume that viewers can hear the soundtrack, but that it’s in a language they can’t understand. Closed captions and “English for HoH Viewers” subtitles assume that the viewer can’t hear the soundtrack, so information is included about sound effects, music, and so forth.
The other difference is the aforementioned editing for reading speed.
Great answers both of you! Thanks!
Many of these positions have been outsourced abroad, as well. I work in South America transcribing English-language television shows. I get paid in the local currency per every 15 minutes of video content I transcribe. Scripted programs are the easiest to do. I definitely do not work off the script, but it’s easier to hear and type what’s being said. Reality shows are much more difficult because people have a greater tendency to mumble, stutter and change thoughts mid-sentence in real life. I’m paid well for the amount of work I do and the cost of living here, but it is definitely much cheaper to have the captioning done in a developing country than it is to do it in the States.
To Gary “Wombat” Robson:
Any chance you are still alerted to posts/replies in this thread?
Thanks,
Jacob