Live captioning mishaps!

When your machine spits out a word that makes you blush

It’s not easy being a captioner. Live captioning at up to 300 words per minute is challenging enough without your stenography machine having a life of its own. The results can be shocking for everyone involved.

Regina DeMoville

Here’s one of our captioners, Regina DeMoville:

I’d just started doing live captioning for broadcast, and was working on a news programme. It was an ad break and I’d turned the realtime captioning off on my stenography machine so I could fix any mistakes and add vocabulary into my steno dictionary. I noticed that I’d tried to write ‘harass’ and it had come out wrong. So I wrote it again, correctly this time, and added it into my dictionary. Unfortunately our software had a mind of its own.

After the commercial I resumed live captioning. To my horror the software spat out “her ass” as I started writing! I was mortified and thought for sure I’d be fired! Thankfully, the TV station did not catch my mistake and I still have a job!

Regina’s TV broadcast captioning set up

That reminds us of the time when a captioner provided live captioning for a university. She was live captioning onto a large screen, to a room full of students. Just one little mis-key on the steno machine and the phrase ‘you’re used to f…..king’ came up instead of what had been said. Cue a room full of laughter and one horrified captioner deeply relieved she was providing realtime captioning remotely!

Regina captions a convention in Las Vegas

When you need to swear but the computer says no…

Here’s Regina again…

I was live captioning a deaf-blind convention in Las Vegas and they had a comedian on stage during the keynote speech. The only prep they gave me was the comedian’s name so I had no idea what was coming. A few minutes in he started telling a joke that contained the F word. As a broadcast captioner I can’t let swear words go out over the air, and had removed those words from the dictionary on my steno machine to make sure.

Once the comedian got into his stride it seemed like every second word was the F word. And because it wasn’t in the dictionary and I was live captioning, I had to write each individual letter out every time he said it. By the time he was halfway through the set it was getting harder and harder to keep up, and completely added to the stress of trying to remember the last joke and the punchline perfectly!

And then there was the Jay Z concert I was live captioning. Knowing how much he swears I’d updated the dictionary in the steno machine in readiness, but the damned steno software censored every swear word he said. The tech guys sorted it out for the second half, but until then the client must have wondered at Jay Z’s newly-reformed character!

Has anything unexpected happened during your live captioning events? Let us know!