A few years ago, prompted by minor, age-related hearing loss and a phase of TV watching that emphasized English-speaking, but heavily accented fare like Masterpiece, Doctor Who, and several movies of British origin, I began using the “Closed Captions” option on our Verizon FIOS system.
“Closed” captions simply means that the viewer can turn them on or off, and for me, choosing to turn them on was as monumental a decision as Keanu Reeves choosing the red pill over the blue pill in The Matrix.
Think of this paragraph as a similar, perhaps milder moment of decision: stop here—read no further—and continue to enjoy video offerings the same way you always have. Or, read on, and allow me, like Laurence Fishburne minus the cool leather and sunglasses, to show you just how deep this rabbit hole goes.
Aside from picking up foreign phrases and slang expressions that would be unintelligible otherwise, I found I enjoyed the experience of reading along with the action. I began using captions for American shows, too, and eventually they became a permanent fixture of television viewing in our home, sometimes over the protests of our children. (One of the advantages of using closed captions is that it’s more convincing when you pretend not to hear such complaints.)
Maybe my history as a heavy reader predisposed me to want to be able to read what’s happening instead of just seeing it, but apparently I’m not alone in that desire. Recent studies have shown that many people use captions if they’re available, and most of the people who do so aren’t deaf or hard of hearing.
Captions can be generated by computer speech-to-text programs, by highly skilled humans called captionists, or some combination of the two. Ideally, one would never even need to consider the source of the captioning, but watching Mets Fast Forward, a show that edits the previous day’s New York Mets baseball game down to an hour-long broadcast, caused me to ask questions.
Reading the captions, I began to notice some strange word formulations. First came mention of “Walter Raleigh”—the famously dashing nobleman of the Elizabethan age. Later, a caption read “After review, Konstanz” (a city in Germany).
While it’s certainly possible that baseball broadcasters might reference a historical figure or a German city, it’s much more likely that they’re saying “What a rally” and “After review, the call stands.” The lack of context consideration was baffling, and listening only to the audio, the correct phrases didn’t seem very difficult to discern.
These occurrences seemed to indicate a computer’s blunt, black and white, zero or one approach, or perhaps a human captionist with an underused European History degree. But this type of error was rare; more common were problems with players’ names, which might be expected if a person was quickly transcribing audio to text.
Short, simple names were handled easily—Smith, Jones, even Rodriguez or Cabrera. But “former Met Brandon Drury” became “former bad brain injury.”
“See if Medina’s hurt” became “living muddiness hurt.” The last name Disclafani became “dysphonia,” a medical term for a hoarse or strained voice.
It wasn’t all bad news, though. “Mets are in business” became “mentor in business.” “Francisco” became “friend Cisco.” And in one of my favorite transcription errors ever, “Jeff McNeil” became “Jeff big deal.”
The more I saw these errors, the more I wondered why they exist. A call and an e-mail to SNY’s captioning contacts yielded no responses, but whether a human captionist or a computer speech-to-text program was responsible, the problem would seem easy enough to remedy: supply the person or computer with a list of players on each team, to expand the vocabulary of captionable names and phrases, like adding often-used words to the dictionary of a smartphone’s autocorrect feature.
This might prevent, or at least reduce the occurrence, of mistakes involving players like Luis Guillorme (pronounced Loo-ees Gi-or-may), a utility player for the Mets whose name has been involved in such hit-and-run captioning classics as “full of whiskey” and “Louise Graham will be the first man to face him.”
I’m not really complaining about these errors; they add another dimension to watching television, a simultaneous sideshow that’s sometimes more entertaining than the game itself. Even the “Red Pill/Blue Pill” scene from The Matrix that I referenced earlier has its own amusing caption quirk, as viewed via YouTube, in which the sound of thunder in the background is described as “applause.”
Elsewhere, closed captions are less error prone but equally diverting, and often educational. Watching Stranger Things on Netflix recently, I was exposed, through captioning, to several thesauruses’ worth of adjectives describing the show’s musical accompaniment. At any given moment, the music might be “whimsical,” “martial,” “epic,” pensive,” or “disconcertingly jaunty.”
Other two word descriptions included “steady, measured,” “poignant, melancholy,” “tender, sentimental,” or on the other end of the spectrum, “sinister, discordant.” The synth music was “quirky,” “disquieting,” “resolute,” “enigmatic,” “triumphant,” “eerie,” or “frantic,” just to name a few.
The extensive (and arguably excessive) vocabulary might indicate the minds of frustrated screenwriters moonlighting as Netflix captions creators, but hey, who doesn’t like a little “eldritch thrumming” with their fictional TV adventures?
Some closed captioning services choose a minimalistic approach, indicating background and incidental music not with a plethora of adjectives, but rather by simply showing a pair of eighth notes and leaving the rest to the viewer’s imagination. But the captions of scripted TV shows often feature the titles and lyrics of songs played during credits and montages, which makes it that much easier to identify music you haven’t heard before—or in the case of Stranger Things, to appreciate the way that “self-destruction” rhymes with “death’s construction” in Metallica’s “Master of Puppets.”
Watching TV with closed captions isn’t perfect—the timing can be too fast or too slow, and occasionally, when a character’s identity is supposed to be concealed, the captions will give away the mystery prematurely. For example, one might see spoiler-laden lines similar to these pop up on the screen simultaneously:
FRIEDA: WHO ARE YOU, CLOAKED FIGURE? I KNOW YOU CAN’T BE FRED, HE’S DEAD!
FRED: I REFUSE TO REVEAL MY IDENTITY AT THIS TIME.
I’d probably be much less tolerant of these occasional blunders if I couldn’t hear at all and was completely dependent on captions to understand what’s happening. But I can switch the captions off at any time—it’s my choice to accept the cons in order to gain the pros, of which there are many.
Using captions semi-convinces me that I’m reading, not just watching TV, and maybe it gets my kids to read more than they would otherwise. It also increases comprehension, according to recent articles in Salon and The Washington Post, which point out that captions are great for kids who don’t like to read, and people learning English as a second language. But for me, the most important reason to use closed captions is that they’re fun—case closed.
Peter Dabbene’s website is peterdabbene.com. His latest work, “Suburban Complaint #1988: Skunked” can be read at The Metaworker. His book Complex Simplicity collects the first 101 editions of this column, along with essays and material published elsewhere. It is now available at Amazon or Lulu.com for $25 (print) or $4.99 (ebook).
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