Closed Caption
I'd like to know how people get jobs typing the captions for television programs and movies, and if the qualifications include "a bizarre sense of phonetic spelling, and a proclivity for describing other content by inventing impossible new music genre names and onomatopoeic descriptions on the fly," or if they somehow teach otherwise normal human beings to think that way as part of the pre-job training.
♫ [acapella breakbeat classical music] ♫
. . . or the attempts to describe non-verbal utterances. . . .
[growing hooting noise]
(If you don't believe me, watch Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me with the captions on.)
For a while I used to keep a list of the best caption faux pas I'd seen. I had quite a collection of moderately amusing instances of misspellings or mis-transcribed dialogue, but the clear winner, the undisputed all time champion of bad captioning, was this — from a forensic crime documentary about a series of prostitute murders in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas in the 1980s:
THE OTHER PROSTITUTE LOOKED ON IN WHORE AS HER FRIEND WAS BRUTALLY RAPED.
Yeah. And I had previously thought the worst Freudian slip would be to call a girlfriend "Mom" during sex. Imagine.
♫ [acapella breakbeat classical music] ♫
. . . or the attempts to describe non-verbal utterances. . . .
[growing hooting noise]
(If you don't believe me, watch Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me with the captions on.)
For a while I used to keep a list of the best caption faux pas I'd seen. I had quite a collection of moderately amusing instances of misspellings or mis-transcribed dialogue, but the clear winner, the undisputed all time champion of bad captioning, was this — from a forensic crime documentary about a series of prostitute murders in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas in the 1980s:
THE OTHER PROSTITUTE LOOKED ON IN WHORE AS HER FRIEND WAS BRUTALLY RAPED.
Yeah. And I had previously thought the worst Freudian slip would be to call a girlfriend "Mom" during sex. Imagine.