Closed-off Captioning
*edited version*
Whenever I’m at the gym, I watch the TV with closed-captioning. Now, I can still kinda hear it, but I mostly rely on the closed captioning. Unlike subtitles, it certainly isn’t spontaneous. Nor always correct. And I’ll tell you, it’s weird seeing the punchline of a Budweiser commercial during a Venus shaver commercial.
This doesn’t affect me too much, since I don’t really watch TV with the CC on too much, but it does have me concerned. What about all those deaf 4-year olds who are watching Sesame Street in order to learn the alphabet, the colors, the numbers, etc? How confused are THEY gonna get? Or, if we were to discuss people who COULD actually read, what about those reality TV shows where they interview catty assholes and innocent angels? Getting those confused because of “jet lag” would change your opinion of the show dramatically.
Or then again, maybe I’m just deaf to the deaf world…
—-
humor-blogs still watches Sesame Street.
7 comments so far
Leave a reply
Ummm…
If the deaf four-year-olds don’t already know the alphabet, how are they reading the CC to learn it?
Just wondering…
boy, then they’re really screwed, aren’t they?
It may help you to understand the process before deciding the captioning sucks or is the worst thing ever. In a nutshell, if it’s a live show, a person who is trained similar to a court reporter is producing the captions. They’re called real-time broadcast captioners. The reason captioning is delayed is because the “captioner” is listening to an audio feed transmitted over phone lines from the TV station to the captioner, who could be located anywhere in the country. The captioner “types” what they hear on their court reporting-type steno machine. The machine is connected to a computer with specialized software which tranlsates it into the written word and sends the “captions” back to the TV station via a modem/phone line, and then the signal is sent out in the signal to the consumer. That’s why it’s delayed. The technology involved to make that happen is pretty complicated, as you can imagine. Any garbled words can be a result transmission problems such as static on the line. (Ever get a bad connection in a phone call?) Mistranslated words can also be caused by the captioner hitting a wrong key, which can happen when you consider most folks are talking at 225 words a minute, which is the average speed of conversation. Hitting one wrong key can cause an entirely incorrect word to translate or a collection of letters that the computer software is trying to make into a word. Captioners work hard to make their captions as clean as possible, believe me. So, it’s not a computer, it’s a person producing the captions. And if it was a computer, the captions would most assuredly look rather odd at times when the computer is trying to guess what someone with an accent, for example, is saying. “Think” and “thing” are very similar sounds, and a human can discern immediately from context which one it should be, but a computer may not be able to. I hope this helps you to understand
to clarify, since you didn’t leave a linkback, I’m not saying that closed-captioning is the worst thing ever. I’m just saying that it is the worst thing ever in the “it’s usually completely unrelated to what’s on the screen and in that way it’s confusing. Let’s think about a situation in which that confusion would be funny.” Closed captioning people do some pretty impressive things, but the results of those unavoidable flaws can have some humorous results.
Sorry I didn’t leave a linkback. That’s the first time I’ve responded to a blog, so I’m new at this. Yes, it can be humorous sometimes. Everyone wishes it were possible to make it more instantaneous like subtitles, but the technology isn’t there yet. I just know how hard those folks work, and to read someone say that captioning is the worst thing ever and sucks is discouraging. Is it perfect? No, but if you’re deaf, at least you can find out what is happening. Try listening to TV without any sound or captions on and see how satisfying that is!
yeah I suppose in my hyperbole, I went over the top. The emphasis is not that closed captioning is flawed, but that there’s humor in that inherent flaw. I apologize. Thank you for being patient enough to kindly point out my ignorance without just going “what an idiot” and leaving. You even returned. yay!
if you’re figuring out how to do that linkback thing and you’re on wordpress, go Users -> Your Profile -> Contact Info -> Website and put your blog url there. Hope that helps.
[...] post by dashofpanache Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and [...]