When captioning goes awry

I’m not sure whether the captioning for this year’s online Worldcon panels is automated or human transcription. One panel that I watched, the captioning was pretty much unreadable, but on another one, it’s pretty good. But even in the good one, there were some mistakes. Such as when one of the panelists used the word firstborns and the caption said first cephalosporins.

3 Responses to “When captioning goes awry”

  1. Teresa King

    I think closed captioning mistakes are made because computers are used and not humans. They make some pretty funny blunders that any human would know better. I will say, and this is probably a completely different subject, that the advent of spell check seems to cause more errors than there used to be. I see professional articles that have errors that can only be attributed to spell check. I think they should hire some humans to check spell checked articles !!! A professional article should look professional !!! It makes me wonder if it’s becoming okay to misspell. That is so unprofessional and attributes to the ” dumbing down ” factor in the modern world. How can children learn that spelling correctly is important if all they see are misspelled articles !!

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  2. Lola

    I’m not quite sure what those mistakes are made by. It could obviously be computers, but could also be a human making a typo. It is hard to be perfect when you are typing so fast. Typists can’t be perfect! I’m curios i’m this subject.

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  3. J-J Cote

    It could be a combination: people typing into a program that is applying spell-check to what they type.

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