At the risk of getting a little lofty and philosophical, I’ve been mulling (over wine) on just what it is, and what it means, to be a voice captioner. So perhaps a trigger warning is in order that this post may contain flagrant speculation, gratuitous Platonic forms, and wanton abstraction.
Voice captioning involves thinking about yourself in a few unusual ways: as a broadcaster, as a viewer, as a content creator, as a narrator, as an interpreter, as a passive conduit or mouthpiece for someone else’s views.
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| With each passing season, the mouthpiece garrisons grow bolder and more ruthless. |
As a broadcaster, a captioner aligns himself or herself with both commentator and newsreader. Like a commentator, we decide on the spot what information needs to be made explicit to enhance the viewer’s understanding of a visual text. Like a newsreader, we funnel and compile the information from autocues, scripts, and audio sources into a coherent narrative thread. I’ve discussed before how such compilation works. I work for a third-party captioning company, but when it’s flowing fairly smoothly, when we can access the same rundowns and script fragments as our clients, it can feel like we are “in the studio”, part of the allied industries of truth, worthy of being a background character in an Aaron Sorkin show, with all attendant privileges, folder-carrying, and stirring music.
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| Sadly, my walk-and-talk is a tad rusty. |
Of course, it isn’t always like that. Whether we're treated as valued colleagues, or a necessary evil or annoyance, or a mistrusted source of intellectual property leaks, or (rather often) not given any thought at all, depends greatly upon the personalities of the relevant station managers and studio directors. Some of my co-workers have worked in the past as in-house captioners for networks, and have remarked on the cultural difference in how our work is conceived. After all, it’s hard to imagine such necessary information as scripts, rundowns, outcomes or ready-to-air media being routinely withheld from the writers, directors, producers, stars, competitors (on reality or game shows), or anyone else who is “in the team”, as readily as it sometimes is from us. It’s different when you’re in-house. With outsourcing comes efficiency, and concentration of expertise, but also alienation.
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| BRB, floating round my tin can. |
In the backs of our minds, also, we know we may also be considered broadcasters as a category of legal liability. It’s certainly rare for captioners to be held responsible for the libel, slander, sedition and other forms of culpable speech, which more likely originate with their client networks. But someday the landmark test case will inevitably come, and a nasty lawsuit will lay down in black and white the extent of our identity as broadcasters. In some jurisdictions, accuracy legislation surely offers an argument in defence of a comfortable margin of error – a 98% rate of accuracy inherently licences 2% of our output to be wrong, scandalously or otherwise, so a tendentious error or two here and there would seem to be protected by statute. But I’d hate to be the one to test it. A particular source of angst is pre-scripted news content. Suppose we push the proverbial Big Red Button to cue out a prepared, edited and scripted sentence which we hear the newsreader begin to read. Now imagine that unbeknownst to us, the newsroom’s legal team has pulled, at the last minute (not a figure of speech, the kind containing 60 seconds), someone’s name right at the end of the sentence. It turns out they weren’t allowed to reveal it, and thus neither were we – but it’s too late to swallow back in. That barn door could prove hard to close. There’s only so much legal caution we can exercise without creating delay, but we’re often pre-emptive where we feel there ought to be an “allegedly”. More often than not, in that event, the newsreader makes the same on-the-fly script amendment that we do. You can’t be too careful.
Sometimes, though, we feel more like viewers. Like we’re “out of the studio”, with no privileged access, no inside knowledge, just reacting to whatever is going to air and trying to explain it as best we can to someone sitting alongside us, who is intelligent and informed, but having trouble following. That sense is most acute when there’s something which I, too, can’t make out, such as when I can’t make sense of someone’s accent, and my position as just another flawed and human viewer and listener is thrown into stark relief. The in-jokes we PM to our co-pilots enhance this experience of captioner-as-viewer. After all, we are literally talking over an audio-visual artefact – does that make what we do the equivalent of Mystery Science Theatre 3000? In that vein, I keep thinking we should also offer alternate, novelty closed caption tracks (idea copyright Rogue Captioner, 2014) which take the piss in real time. It’s gonna be a hit.
Then again, sometimes we think of ourselves as content creators. We create the first rough written transcript of whatever we caption live, and some of our clients take advantage of that as the basis for what will then be tidied (perhaps by us) into a verbatim online transcript. That also gives us an odd little margin of creative freedom. Future posts will go into more detail about what that freedom can entail, but suffice to say it’s never quite as simple as saying what you hear. Punctuation is one example. Extemporised speech is punctuated with comparative informality, but on the page or screen, the game changes. Imagine the shift in tone if the following phrase exclusively used commas in place of its full stops:
Misogyny. Sexism. Every day from this Leader of the Opposition. Every day. In every way. Across the time the Leader of the Opposition has sat in that chair, and I've sat in this chair, that is all we have heard from him.
It would be the same speech, but the effect on the page would be very different. As phrased above, it reads like a boxer, landing a self-assured one-two punch with each staccato sentence. But with all commas, it becomes a kind of cumulative litany, ideas and grievances piling up with each subordinate clause, more like an adept freestyler converting his anguish into passionate, deeply personal rhyme. Dashes and colons would be different again, and exclamation marks could read either as forceful or shrill. Either way that creative choice, however small, is routinely ours. So when I see quotes from a politician later that day, sourced from a web transcript I created, the sense of recognition contains within it a peculiar kernel of ownership. Like the child in the end credits of the X-Files, I Made This!
Of course, another lens through which to interpret our role is that of an interpreter. We facilitate communication between people who can’t necessarily share an immediate and direct linguistic connection. I recognised both the work of colleagues in the accessibility industry and a unique and unexpected practical challenge recently, while voice captioning a live session of the United Nations Security Council. Some Eastern Bloc leaders and ambassadors were speaking through a live interpreter, as they often do. The thing is, the interpreters were adjusting, just like I do, to the rhythms of speech of their subjects. They would pause momentarily to hear what came next, and to take a breath, and then maybe 10 words would pour out in a rush. Perfectly comprehensible to the listener, just subtly uneven in pace. But for me, trying to do the same thing on top of that was really hard, like a kind of Captionception. Three people simultaneously saying the same thing, to three different audiences (Ukrainian, hearing-Anglophone, and hearing-impaired-Anglophone), presented interesting difficulties in pacing, as well as that whole pesky breath thing.
And lastly (for now), there’s something strange and at times slightly horrific about having to rearticulate, with my own voice-box, the views of some truly awful people. To have to hear myself say out loud, for instance, that Romanians are destroying English society, or that Stopping The Boats would somehow help to pay off Australia’s modest national debt, or that the science of climate change is anything but iron-clad. Or, more pointedly, that the axing of the position of Disability Commissioner on the Australian Human Rights Commission is a good and necessary thing, because Freedom. Of course I know, at some level, it isn’t me doing this. I’m just the messenger. But is that the Nuremburg Defence? Am I just taking orders? Of course, I reassure myself that the best thing I can do is transmit, in its unadulterated ugliness, the abhorrent things said by those in power. All that I am empowered to do is to make sure that all viewers understand, with perfect clarity, the capacity of awful people to say awful things. Give them enough rope etc. I think that can only be a good thing, even if it makes me a passive conduit for something grotesque. But it’s a singular feeling, to just say everything. To be a voice and nothing more.
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| Albeit a cyborg micro-processor-equipped online voice from the future. |
So anyway, tying this up nicely into a bow might be against the spirit of this post. Better perhaps to end as we started, with the question: as a captioner, just what the hell am I?
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