Live Subtitling
Thread poster: Anja Graefe
Anja Graefe
Anja Graefe  Identity Verified
Italy
Local time: 16:16
English to German
+ ...
Sep 13, 2010

Hello subtitlers and translators,

I was just wondering if anybody out there knew anything about live subtitling/live captioning.
It seems to be a growing field in the audiovisual branch.

Would anybody know if there are any courses offered somewhere, ways to start working as a live subtitler, ways to make some experience or practice it.

Any ideas and helpful tips are welcome.


 
Stephen Fennell
Stephen Fennell  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
Local time: 15:16
Member (2010)
French to English
+ ...
I do live subtitling for deaf people. Jan 24, 2011

In Britain the official name is "electronic notetaking", a vile, longwinded name. It means that you don't type EVERYTHING, just a summary - but it should be a good full summary using complete sentences so that it can be read without difficulty. (There is a profession in which you type literally EVERYTHING that is said. It requires a special keyboard and special software that accepts abbreviations and converts them into the full word.)

I started doing live subtitling without knowing
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In Britain the official name is "electronic notetaking", a vile, longwinded name. It means that you don't type EVERYTHING, just a summary - but it should be a good full summary using complete sentences so that it can be read without difficulty. (There is a profession in which you type literally EVERYTHING that is said. It requires a special keyboard and special software that accepts abbreviations and converts them into the full word.)

I started doing live subtitling without knowing that it existed as a profession. At church some of us used to write notes by hand for a deaf lady so she could follow what was said in the services. (She was not born deaf. She had learned English before she went deaf at the age of 7, so she had no difficulty understanding written English.) One day she asked me if I would try typing the service on her son's laptop. I felt very nervous because I hadn't typed properly for 15 years, but I did a little practice with my sister that afternoon, and then in the evening service I tried it for real for the first time. It was nerve-wracking but immediately successful because on a laptop the writing is always legible. You can make the letters any size you want. All the fingers share in the work, instead of two or three fingers having to do all the work as in handwriting, so there is less pain in the fingers. With practice you get faster and faster. When I started typing for this deaf lady I probably typed about 15 - 20 words a minute. Now, 5 years later, I type at about 50 or 60 words per minute. I must add that I probably speeded up too fast and allowed myslef to develp many bad speeling habits which do marr my output. But the deaf lady assures me constantly that she can always tell what I meant to type (well, nearly always!), and she urges me not to go back and correct spelling mistakes.

Over time a small group of volunteers joined me in typing so that we could share the task. Typing more than half an hour at a time is possible but exhausting and makes you strangely reluctant to offer to do it again. I would recommend that a new typist type only 5 or 10 minutes at first. The pressure is very like the pressure on a simultaneous interpreter, or on a musician playing in public - you can't stop if you get stuck. Your brain has to listen, think of a shorter way to say the same thing, and then type that while listening to the next bit. Over time I think I have become hardened to this pressure, but still, after 30 minutes of a fast-speaking preacher I feel very tired and my back aches. But it is worth it: the deaf lady at my church said "That laptop is my ears!"

We found that foreigners with not-very-good English who came to our church tended to sit where they could see the subtitles because the written version helped them understand better. A number of people who were becoming hard-of-hearing would sit where they could see the screen too.

After I had been typing live subtitles like this for a year or two, I heard that there were courses in Electronic Note-taking, such as the following one at City Lit in London: http://www.citylit.ac.uk/courses/deaf_education/Professional_training/Electronic_note-taking/GE002
I went on that course in 2010 and am waiting for my results. It cost about £750. It involved a week in class followed by a LOT of homework - short essays, self-appraisal, and finding meetings where you can practice. They give you some remarkably good free software called Note-Ed (written by a university in England somewhere). The course is run by people who do electronic note-taking themselves professionally at City Lit, because City Lit attracts many deaf students. Some of the deaf students need sign-language interpreters (their mother tongue being sign language), others need electronic note-takers (if their mother tongue is a spoken language that they can read, or if they want to improve their knowledge of the spoken language).

My impression is that most of the paid work for electronic note-takers is in colleges and universities, but I am sure there could be other times when a deaf person would like live subtitling, such as going to the doctor or seeing someone from the council.

I am pretty sure that humans are also used for live subtitles for television (e.g. the news). Although TV companies do use automatic speech recognition software (probably Dragon) for this as well, the results can be maddening nonsense. Speech recognition software just isn't capable even now of correctly transcribing speech unless the audio conditions are ideal and there is one speaker (not two) speaking clearly and without ums and ers. Dragon can "autopunctuate" but only by guessing from the length of pauses, and the only punctation it can add is full stops and commas. Consequently I believe humans are still in use for live TV work.

Stephen Fennell
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kmtext
kmtext
United Kingdom
Local time: 15:16
English
+ ...
There are various options Jan 27, 2011

Some live programmes are subtitled by teams of subtitlers working in relays, while others use stenographers and others use respeaking.

Rolling captions tend to be done by stenographers and respeakers, while distinct captions are usually done by a subtitler.

There are a number of stenography courses, but they're expensive. Some universities and colleges offer courses that include subtitling modules, but few do a dedicated course, and I don't think any of them offer a liv
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Some live programmes are subtitled by teams of subtitlers working in relays, while others use stenographers and others use respeaking.

Rolling captions tend to be done by stenographers and respeakers, while distinct captions are usually done by a subtitler.

There are a number of stenography courses, but they're expensive. Some universities and colleges offer courses that include subtitling modules, but few do a dedicated course, and I don't think any of them offer a live module, so the best way to get into live subtitling is through one of the subtitling houses.

It's a stressful job, similar to simutaneous interpretation, and not for the faint-hearted, which requires excellent spelling (except in the case of respeaking) and a wide general knowledge base coupled with a keen interest in news and current affairs.
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