Closed Captioning Gaffe

Jolie77

Jolie77

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As we all know, From time to time, we all would see some errors on the closed captioning. Some of them are funny, some of them are just too wrong to fit in.

The funniest one I came across earlier this evening was, when I watched The Weather Channel to see what the weather condition would be for tomorrow -- The caption read as "weather bonk com" when it was supposed to say "weather dot com". :lol:

Share your spots of closed captioning gaffes! :D

What are the ones that stuck to you or found amusing to read?
 
I remember a time when I was watching Growing Pains on television years ago. During the show, 2 of the characters started arguing over something. I don't remember exactly what was said, but it was the typical "Did not!" "Did too!" argument that kept being said for a while. After they said it back and forth 10 times, the captioning got stuck in a loop and those two phrases kept going even though the show went on with different dialog. It finally stopped when the commercials appeared.
 
VamPyroX said:
I remember a time when I was watching Growing Pains on television years ago. During the show, 2 of the characters started arguing over something. I don't remember exactly what was said, but it was the typical "Did not!" "Did too!" argument that kept being said for a while. After they said it back and forth 10 times, the captioning got stuck in a loop and those two phrases kept going even though the show went on with different dialog. It finally stopped when the commercials appeared.
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Speaking of the commercials, I often see some captions that are delayed. For instance, the shows are turned to go into commercial but yet, the captions from the shows would still be scrolling up when the commercials are on. That's the part that I find annoying to begin with.
 
Jolie77 said:
Speaking of the commercials, I often see some captions that are delayed. For instance, the shows are turned to go into commercial but yet, the captions from the shows would still be scrolling up when the commercials are on. That's the part that I find annoying to begin with.
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Yeah.

There was one episode of Andromeda where the captions went through the whole show within minutes. Apparently, they forgot to add time stamps for the captions. So, instead of showing up only at the right time... it just showed up for 1 second, then the next, then the next, without matching the script. So, the captioning was done for the whole show within 5 minutes. After that, the show continued to run for the next 40 minutes.
 
The captioning work I'm doing right now already has a transcription provided to me, but they are awful! My favourite of late has to be when a woman onscreen says "There's one, there's one...you're one" and the transcription they provided to me said "better time, better time, better time" That doesn't even sound the same!
 
On the spider man movie. I think it was the first one. A guy throws a glass into a fire place and the CC reads:

[ass shatters] :)

Ron
 
I remember one cc gaffe years ago when I was watching the news about ships out at sea with my parents and the captions were Shit floating out at sea.. My mother had a field day with that one.
 
I was watching the news, and the subtitles said "Palestinians insist there should be no juice in Gaza". I was like what?! It took me a while to figure out it should have been "no JEWS in Gaza"; the fact they were showing refugee kids drinking water was just coincidence.
 
Not a gaffe per se...

Not a gaffe per-se, but fairly common one I see, especially on live PBS shows is:

NO CARRIER
RING
RING
CONNECT 9600​

which suggests to me that live captioning is a work-at-home job.

Most of the more amusing gaffes, look as though the captioners are
repeating the show dialogue into a (trained) speech-recognition program
(similiar to Dragon Naturally Speaking). I think such programs can be
used with multiple training setups, where the training focuses on words
specific to the show (politics, sports, cooking, etc)

I wonder if we'll see, within our lifetimes, handheld speech to text translators
that work quickly, and well.
 
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