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I was eating with my family at a local restaurant last night when I noticed they had the news playing on a TV nearby showing local news. In such a crowded venue the sound was useless, so they had Closed Captioning on.
It was the worst Closed Captioning I've seen in a long while.
OK, I snickered when they announced "Next Sign Felt, Elaine Yada Yada's..."
I winced when the interesting article on schools not getting promised funding for Katrina Evacuee's was cut short on the Captioning because they were so slow with the words a Chevy commercial was half over.
Suddenly I was spitting my food across the floor, and laughing out loud much to the confusion of everyone in the restaurant.
The next news article was about a new medical procedure. I didn't get the details because I couldn't get past the new hormone therapy.
Or as the Closed Captioning put it. "This new hore moan was guaranteed...." They went on to discuss this hore moan-ing 7 more times during the story. Not once did they type the correct hormone.
Well, at least there was no W in their spelling. That would have caused me to be evicted from the restaurant.
Posts: 11895 | Registered: Apr 2002
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Or the person typing just couldn't keep up and any typos (of the "Hoqued Own Fanix" kind) slipped through.
Posts: 7085 | Registered: Apr 2001
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The closed captioning for soap operas is really bad. I mean really bad. Actually, it's not so much closed captioning but more like line noise. I think it must not have been working. This was years ago and on NBC soaps, but I have seen it more than once being like that.
Posts: 2880 | Registered: Jun 2004
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This is what makes me think it must be speech recognition. It's unlikely to be a typo, since it's more effort to type it this way than it is to type it correctly.
Posts: 13680 | Registered: Mar 2002
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Ick, to my knowledge, speech recognition is not used for closed captioning. Most of the people who do closed captioning for local TV stations do it from home, live and it is submitted via broadband to the TV station. I've looked into it as a stay-at-home type of job.
There's a link to one of the many companies that provide this service. Now that I think about it, I should totally apply. I type super-fast and my accuracy is top-notch.
Posts: 4753 | Registered: May 2002
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Is it possible that someone who does this type of work in Dan's market got lazy, and just hooked it up to a speech-recognition program? Or, failing that, that the TV studio failed to find someone for this slot, and so used SR themselves?
Posts: 13680 | Registered: Mar 2002
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I've seen worse than that-- The Learning Channel, besides having largely laughable programming, consistently has the worst closed captioning I've ever seen-- to the point of garbled and unintelligible. (I've been using a lot of CC becasue we don't want to disturb Ems while she's asleep at night and our walls are very thin; I've found that I can zone out with the heating pad while she continues to slumber if I turn the volume to "1" and turn the captions on.)
Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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Heh. You should see closed captioning try to keep up with some sporting events. It's a wonder they get anything intelligible out of it at all.
Posts: 5422 | Registered: Dec 2001
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Are you sure it wasn't "hoar"? Cuz I can easily see how accidentally/reflexively* spacing between hor and mone is could be auto-spellchecked at the studio computer into hoar and moan after leaving the original typist. Especially if the studio computer runs a speech recognition program as crosscheck in its "naughty words and phrases" censor program. Otherwise, the "error"s sound more like deliberate "but the boss can't prove it" punning by a bored translator. Then again, it could just be yet another local job outsourced to India/etc.
* By reflexively, I mean the sort of mistake by which the is commonly typoed as teh
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