Fun with closed captioning
On the treadmill at the gym today, watching CNN with the closed captioning enabled, and the “news story” (I use the term loosely) is about Barack Obama bowling. The caption says this:
“Obama used bawdy language to will the ball away from the gutter.”
My interest was piqued — until I realized it was body language, not bawdy language, that he was using, and that the closed-captioning transcriber had messed up. Darn! Bawdy language would have been much more interesting. Stupid homophones….
April 1st, 2008 at 9:04 pm
Once I was watching the news at a restaurant and the close captioning said a girl “felt and heard her need.” Turns out the girl “fell and hurt her knee,” but it’s something I joke with my family a lot about. Now that I think about it, I don’t know the context and have no idea how it was news. Oh well…
April 2nd, 2008 at 5:24 am
While watching/reading the closed captioning for CNN news at the gym after Hurricane Katrina first hit, I was momentarily confused about the evacuation of someplace called “Two Lane” (Tulane)
April 2nd, 2008 at 7:22 am
I have no idea what that close caption sentence means, but extra kudos to the captioner who managed to write a completely original sentence that has probably never been written in all of English history.
April 2nd, 2008 at 8:44 am
You were on a treadmill? You belong to a gym? You are not the man I thought you were.
April 2nd, 2008 at 8:46 am
Too funny. I was just waching the news on closed captioning last night and the captioner wrote (I don’t remember the precise sentence) that something was an “offly difficult situation.”
I thought it was awfully funny.
April 2nd, 2008 at 9:11 am
Am I the only one who must have captions on to understand what people are saying on tv?
April 2nd, 2008 at 9:53 am
Diane,
All the fast food Eric eats is probably getting to him. He might have just had a moment of inspiration and decided to get his life together and start working out to improve his health.
Don’t worry, those usually wear off quickly, and he’ll be back on the dark side before you know it.
April 2nd, 2008 at 10:45 am
I think that some of the closed caption on cheaper programs is done with voice-recognition technology. This would explain some of the errors that no human would ever make, such as the transcription of a physical sound effect into a word.
April 2nd, 2008 at 12:16 pm
I recommend watching Judge Judy with closed captioning while on the treadmill at the gym. Somehow “He ain’t my baby daddy, Your Honor!” is a lot funnier when read. It doesn’t even need homophones!
April 3rd, 2008 at 9:38 am
Actually, most news broadcasts and live broadcasts use a stenograph, which is the same thing that court reporters use. Except, in this case, it’s connected to a computer that will send out closed-captioning during the broadcast. The stenograph machine can be programmed to recognize phonetic patterns, so the typist can only enter a few letters (some consonants and a vowel) and the computer will often “guess” the rest. Obviously, there have been mistakes.
I am deaf and depend on the closed-captioning for my understanding. Usually, in a half-hour news broadcast, there are over 100 mistakes (and sometimes the court reporter can’t even catch up, so there might be large gaps).
I’ve also seen stenographers use these machines during my college classes, and they’ll use them as “note-taking” devices and print out the notes for me. I’ve seen how the computer guesses the phonetically-correct word, but gets way off base. (e.g., the person will begin to phonetically type out “success” and the computer guesses “sex” at first… EVERY TIME!)
One of my favorites on the news broadcasts, though, is when the weatherman says, “Looks like we’ll have rape tomorrow,” where the computer guessed the word was “rape” and not “rain.”
My pet peeve isn’t the spelling errors or phonetically-guessed words. Actually, it’s when the anchors banter and chat in between the stories, or before the sports. And the stenographer simply types, “overlapping dialogue.”
Grrr….
April 3rd, 2008 at 10:41 am
Since I clean up court reporter transcripts for a living (I’m a scopist), the messiness of captions just annoys me to no end. Especially when it’s a Simpsons or Seinfled rerun that you know is going to be shown thousands of times and it just looks like the court reporter gives up in the middle. I wonder why they don’t go back later and fix it. I’m always just hoping the reporters get docked in pay for the huge chunks of dialog that are missing.
April 5th, 2008 at 11:33 pm
Funny thing is that they aren’t homophones in the East; “aw” and short “o” are distinct sounds here.
This reminds me of an announcement I heard once in church, that “Don” would be teaching Sunday School in room 1 and “Don” would be teaching in room 2. Of course, the speaker meant “Don” and “Dawn”, but there was utterly no way to tell which was which, without going to the room to find out.