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There
are many companies providing captioning services and captioning quality
can vary among the different companies. Often, errors occur because of
technical problems in transmitting and receiving the captions.
Misspellings on a prerecorded program are usually
caused by human error. NCI has systems in place to review captions twice
before they are released to the client.
Real-time captioning, which is done "live",
poses unique challenges. Because the captions are displayed instantly,
there is no time to proofread them or correct an error. To avoid mistakes,
captioners spend a considerable amount of time in advance researching
and entering into the computer any words that might come up on a particular
program, such as players' names in a baseball game or geographical references
that might appear on the news. For instance, if a captioner does not have
the word "mosquito" in his/her computer dictionary, the computer
may not recognize the syllables as a word, and might just print them out
as "moss key toe." Captioners must also make the computer distinguish
among words that sound the same, like "to," "too"
and "two".
Mistakes can be caused by the captioner hitting
wrong keys or by the computer incorrectly translating the phonetic code.
Spoken words that are muffled or hard to understand can lead to captioning
errors, too. And new captioners, although they have had years of stenographic
training, still need actual broadcast experience to bring their skills
to the highest level.
Spur-of-the-moment editing is needed if a word
is spoken that the captioner knows the computer will not translate correctly
or if the dialogue is too fast to take down verbatim. Captions may even
fall behind as they are created because there is a limit on how fast the
television set can show them. Then it appears as if the captions are not
keeping pace with the dialogue.
NCI's standard of accuracy for live captioning
is 98% -- much higher than that of some captioning companies. If a captioner
writes approximately 7,000 words in an hour-long program, at an average
of two syllables per word that amounts to 14,000 key strokes. Not many
people can simultaneously listen and reproduce what they've just heard
at a high rate of speed for an hour or more.
Some problems may occur during the transmission
and reception of the television signal. Captions are a delicate part of
the signal and any interference may cause them to become garbled or to
disappear. The captions may be subject to interference in the process
of being broadcast, starting with the phone lines that transmit the captions
from NCI to the broadcaster all the way to your own equipment at home,
so there are often technical reasons for poor or missing captions. Even
the quality of the equipment can affect whether the captions are displayed
accurately.
Our program monitors check to be sure that
the captions are readable on nationally-broadcast programs captioned by
NCI. |
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