SCIFI CC SKS

[drewan]

The closed captioning on SciFi channel REALLY sucks.

Recently we moved the TV from our bedroom to the loft. Joe is on the phone with his mother, so I don't want to turn the tv up to much. So I turned on the closed captioning. The completely miss words, and misspell words in almost every sentence.

Granted, it's one of SciFi's Saturday night movies, "Magma:Volcanic Disaster."

But I noticed the crappy closed captioning a couple weeks ago when we were over at perkk's for BSG. I feel sorry for anyone who really relies on CC to understand what's going on in the show or movie.

Comments

[benpanced.livejournal.com]

Over on Television Without Pity, there's a messageboard related to CC. One of the posters works for one of the captioning offices and said the lousy captioning can be related to transcribers relying on what they hear, as opposed to written scripts they receive from the networks, or glitches in the signal transmission.

My favorites are the times where blocks of garbage come out, such as:

&&&&&&&&&&
&&&&&&&&&&
&&&&&&&&&&
&&&&&&&&&&

or the titles are running 30 seconds behind the dialogue.

[gearjock.livejournal.com]

I have a severe hearing problem and you are right, Sci Fi is worse than most. The good news, sometimes the fuck-up are hilarious and it ends up making a so-so show pretty funny ;)

[cpj.livejournal.com]

I think part of the problem is signal loss sometimes, but the majority of the mistakes are bad dictation taking. You'll usually see words that are phonetically spelled incorrectly, or stuff like that.

[sraun]

I remember someone on my friends list reporting on their attempt to get a job as a closed captioner - they were not hired because they were too accurate. Not too slow, too accurate. This caused a significant loss of perceived value to closed captioning on my part.

[huladavid.livejournal.com]

I think I can understand that, actually. When I studied ASL interpreting (never finished, though) I had a bit of trouble being too literal, too "word for word". What's needed is being able to get the idea across, all the while taking cultural differences into account.

[sraun]

If it were really a translation - such as you get in Anime sub-titles, for instance - I'd agree with you. But closed captioning is supposed to be a transliteration - they do it for newscasts! - so it should be delivering visually the statements delivered audibly.

For example - if I said 'thank you for crockpot', but the closed captioning said 'thank you for the crackpot', I'd consider that to be a big problem.

[yarram.livejournal.com]

It was even worse 15 years ago. Star Trek was a favorite show at the time, but the captioning constantly summarzied dialog, including bits where the exact wording was critical to understanding certain plot points. Really Freaking Annoying, to say the least. And I could hear significantly better back in those days...

[frstythesnowman.livejournal.com]

I'd say they don't have any proof readers. Any.

Also, any complaints are not reaching the right ears.

[perkk.livejournal.com]

You're welcome to come over this Friday to watch The Lost Room!