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Closed Captions

We watch a lot of TV with the CC enabled so that we don’t have to have the sound up too loud. It’s interesting to note the difference between shows with pre-typed captions and those done “on the fly.”

I actually don’t know much about the process involved in the latter. There’s a small delay between the audio and the CC, and so I assume that someone with good transcription skills, like a court stenographer, is listening to the audio and typing real-time. I suppose a computer could do it, but from what I’ve experienced with that kind of technology, it’s unlikely.

Occasionally some words are transcribed oddly. For example, I was just flipping past NBC news, and Brokaw said something about “Dukakis.” But the CC said “Duh Cawkiss.”

If only it had been “Duh Caucus.” That would be a great political epithet, wouldn’t it?

2 Responses to “Closed Captions”

  1. Phelps Says:

    I bet they do it with a machine similar to a court reporters “real time transcript” machine. Shorthand is taken down phonetically (even on the machines.) When a court reported does real time (where all the lawyers and the judge get the transcript in the courtroom as it happens on their laptops) the computer takes that phonetic feed from the steno machine and converts it to plain English. In that system, you get exactly that sort of thing, especially with proper names. I think you saw it with Dukakis because the reporters will add proper names to the dictionary so the machine knows them, but it has been so long since 84 that he isn’t in the news dictionary anymore. If that happened with, say, Lieberman, you would get the right name instead of the phonetic “lee bear man.”

  2. Thibodeaux Says:

    Makes sense to me. Thanks!

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