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Is ESPN's Closed Caption Decoder Racist?

First of all, you have to understand how "live" closed captioning works: namely, a stenocaptioner is sitting in his or her living room (or possibly at a work station) with a set of headphones on listening to the live signal via telephone which they then retype into their stenotype keybroards (which is similar to a court stenographer's keyboard). The caption is then transmitted back to the source and encoded and decoded for over the air.

If the stenocaptioner mishears or misunderstands what the talent is saying - or makes a typo - it goes out over the air. How many times have you misheard someone you are on the phone with? Lucky for you, you can say "what's that?" or "what did you say?" to clarify. Live stenocaptioners cannot.

Pre-recorded programming is usually captioned using the original script, occasionally you will see minor diologue differences between what is said and what is captioned...which means the script was changed at the last minute, but the captioner didn't receive the change.

Of course, this doesn't mean that someone isn't intentionally slipping something into a caption they shouldn't, but I doubt the examples you provided have any malice behind them.
 
Not exactly ESPN, this is off the caption track at the end of an episode NBC's "Meet the Press" programme sometime in February (via KGW-8, over cable)--

Quote:

FOR MORE INFORMATION ON TODAY'S
GHOSTS AND OPTICS, PLEASE VISIT THE
MEET THE PRESS EBB SIGHT.

Unquote.

Ghosts and Optics.....they did show clips from a filmed interview with Ronald Reagan that was apparently held eons ago........

But I think that's stretching morbidity a little too far!!.................
 
Why isn't there technology that would allow a show to be closed captioned from the source using voice recognition software and the teleprompters? The hearing impaired deserve better.
 
A lot of smaller-market stations, that don't rely heavily on "breaking news", do use their teleprompter scripts for closed captioning. Larger markets and the network's mostly use the "live" captioning. I've read that voice recognition software is being tested, but its no where near being capable (yet) of encoding for captioning.
 
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