Someone doing captioning until something better comes along or because it’s the only job vaguely related to your B.A. (Hono[u]rs) English degree.
Someone with so little life experience, and experience watching TV of all kinds, that you do not automatically know what people are talking about and know up front nearly every single term they use.
Someone who at any level thinks you can just look that up when you get a chance.

You have to have enough experience and literacy, cultural and otherwise, to understand what people are saying exactly when you hear it. You then have to know exactly how to render all those words. You cannot sit there and guess. And, as a typical young woman with a B.A. (Hono[u]rs) History would do, just write shit down phonetically because you don’t understand it and you’ve got a quota to meet.

That’s why a workforce of young people, mostly female, with commercially-useless liberal-arts degrees are actively harmful to captioning.

Clear?

Here, I think each version of how HypnoToad sounds is charmingly unique. It is an interesting exercise to see the different interpretations of how each captionist perceived the sound. Was one captionist a hearing person? was one captionist a late deafened adult listening to the source video with major audio technical headphones (don’t scoff, because 30 years ago, I read in the newsletter produced by the National Captioning Institute a short bio of one of their captionists who WAS very hard of hearing – she used a transcript and listened with great big powerful earphones to hear and then typed the sound out or the words out. There was even a photo of the lady. This was in the days before the WorldWideWeb phase of the Internet).

As for the source of the sound like knowing that it is a recording of a turbine engine being played backwards – hmmm, I’d think that would be distracting in the actual performance. But there is a place for that, if it’s part of a DVD performance, and that would be one of those side shows, where scene outtakes, bloopers, biographical info on the actors, that sort of thing is located. Film producers could conceivably include a discussion from the sound people as to how sounds were made, what technical challenges presented in performing the captions, etc.

Oh another thought is, we don’t know who the viewers are and what their background is – so when you bring the viewers to the table, what you might prefer in terms of caption performance might be different then what I believe I would prefer (I mostly just want whatever English words they use spelled correctly!!) or what someone else watching it might prefer and/or understand, for that matter. Some of these details like how a sound sounds like (droning, buzzing, sputtering) might have no meaning for one person, just because they may be from another country and mentally translating into their language, and maybe their language, people don’t “sputter” or things don’t “dronw”? who know? I’m not a language expert, but I have read about certain concepts important to one language and culture might have many many different words to explain different shades of meaning, and in the English word, there’s only one word. For example – the classic story about the Native Peoples of Alaska or Canada, having something like 30 words in their language that have to do with the concept of “ice” – yet in English, “ice” is “ice”. Maybe “Black ice” for those who might have an understanding of that concept, but parts of the English speaking states in USA and other countries might not ever see snow and ice on the ground in their lifetimes, so “black ice” wouldn’t really even mean anything.

Seems like in my art history classes, we heard that in the Italian and French languages there were far more words used to describe different nuances of art, food, and music than what we use for the same concepts in English speaking countries. Can’t think of any specific examples now, but I do remember Evelyn Glennie’s husband telling me that the Italian word for both “hear” and “feel” is “sentire”. Why do we have one word to describe “hear” that stuff that goes in our ears, and “feel” that stuff we can feel with our hands, when sound itself, depending on the volume, can be both heard and felt? It’s an interesting way to relate to the world, and to think that sometimes the senses are far more integrated then we might imagine.

Anyway, this is just one perspective – I’m hardly so involved as to say that it is the “right” perspective or the “only” perspective, any more than the previously offered comments, all of which add to the overall understanding and perception of the captions as we receive them….

All I can say, is THANK GOD someone out there captions these shows… makes it easier for me to pick through and decide which shows are worth watching and which shows I can just go “move along, nothing to see here..” and quickly change channels. Or turn the HypnoToad show OFF!! (smile!!!)

As a “man who received a liberal arts degree in his 20s” (a long time ago), I struggle with the criticism of the liberal arts. In many ways, the liberal arts have provided me with just the right kind of training to manage the demands of modern life and many of the demands of captioning (as I have come to understand them).

But I think what’s key to the criticism is the claim that most (new) captioners have “next to no life experience.” Here’s the full quote from Joe Clark:

“…most captioners in Canada are women in their 20s with next to no life experience and with liberal-arts degrees they can’t use.”

I’m not sure this is fair either, but I have to admit that it makes sense in the context of a TV show like Family Guy, which I think I would be ill-equipped to caption if I were in my 20s today. Too many of the pop culture references are located in the 1970s and 1980s. Captioners need to be pretty knowledgeable of the world to recognize and know how to caption allusions to sounds of the past.

Your question is an excellent one — paraphrased as: If not the liberal arts, then what are captioning companies looking for? — and I’d love to hear more responses to this question. In interviews I conducted with captioners (and continue to conduct!), I believe all the participants had degrees in the liberal arts (journalism, theater, English, Communication Studies).

Sean

That aside, I agree with pretty much everything else in this article. The fundamental problem is that the people who pay for these services are by and large not the people who use these services, and they’ve shown time and again that they’re willing to forgo quality for the sake of a price cut. It’s very disheartening. I can only hope that as the Baby Boomer generation starts using captioning more and more often, they’ll create a significant market force that holds companies accountable for providing quality captioning, and that affects their bottom line when they cut corners. Without the influence of caption users and their wallets, this downward trend of cost and quality is only too likely to continue.

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*Which required me to read, discuss, and write papers on the following books over the course of four years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._John%27s_College_%28United_States%29#The_Great_Books

I inserted your name in brackets and linked to one of the pages on your site that includes the reference. Thanks!

Sean

I prefer more flexible guidelines over rigid rules.

Sean

And the subtitles skip “This is me”

Both captions ands subtitles skip “You” in “You take it. Go ahead”, and the Subtitles skip “Go ahead”.

None of these things actually impact the movie, like the skipping of the long name, but seem oddly absent. Probably just human error – lack of time and easy to overlook on a long project.

But I imagine that captioning the name, one would have had to have some access to that information – It’s not in IMDb under character names, just under quotes.

skip ahead to about 1:55 then watch.

A usability study involving deaf and HoH readers discussing the different options for the hypnotoad sound would be interesting!

Sean