Bottom of the Barrel
I’m skipping show and tell this week because my brain is scattered all over the place with a zillion things I need to plan and do and think about before we leave for Mexico one week from tomorrow. Holy crap.
But one thing I have been meaning to share this little tidbit.
I spend a fair amount of time at the gym on a treadmill. And since I can never remember my iPod I’m at the mercy of the gym video network and six other tvs that have various shows on with the closed captioning going. I guess if I had some sort of snazzy radio I could tune to the appropriate station and hear what Regis and Kelly or Martha Stewart are actually saying, but I don’t. For some reason, I just follow along with the captioning.
And I have to tell you that if I were hearing impared and relied on the closed captioning for my news and entertainment, I would be pissed off. I think they have drunk monkeys doing the transcribing. And this isn’t just one network - I see it on NBC, ABC and CNN. I have no idea how it actually works behind the scenes, if each network does their own captioning or if each network uses the same service. No clue. But half of what I read on the screen makes no sense thanks to typos and just flat out craziness. Some of the things I see up there aren’t even real words. Sometimes I find myself giggling at the nonsense and then sometimes I find myself getting really angry that someone is getting paid to do this job, to make the lives of hearing impaired people easier, and they obviously aren’t taking it seriously. I can understand a typo here and there, but this is over the top.
Maybe I better make it a point to bring the iPod to the gym. I obviously need something else to think about before I start a riot amongst the deaf community.
Filed under Pet Peeves, Random Ramblings |3 Responses to “Bottom of the Barrel”
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I watch everything with closed captioning on (I process better visually than I do aurally, even though I can hear fine)…you’re probably mostly watching live shows, which are captioned by a machine for the most part, or by a person who presses shortcuts that trigger the words. Which means more often than not, the correct word isn’t going to show up if there are alternate spellings for the same sound. It defaults to the most common…otherwise, it’d be hard to caption something in semi-real time!
Granted, I catch quite a few typos in pre-taped shows, too, but not nearly as many as the live shows. Movies have the best captioning, but still typo-y.
You people and your gyms and your iPods and your treadmills and your hot bods and your high staminas.
CC’ing does suck these days. It’s ridiculous! Here’s hoping most can read lips.
I was going to say what Kate said…
The machines they use to close caption are shortened key boards much like the ones that the court reporters use.
And sometimes if it’s a human doing the work they are listening to audio and have to transcribe that way.
So it’s hard work.
And I know few deaf people that care that much about proper grammar - it’s the vocabulary that matters.
That sounds insensitive but it isn’t.