Lady Mondegreen

[noracharles]

Conan O'Brien is interviewing some guy.

Conan: "You're married to the lovely and talented and nefarious."

Nora: O_o

Conan puts a photo of Anna Farris on the screen.

Comments

[laughingrat]

HAHAHAHHAHA

[noracharles]

:-D

[jesse_the_k]

*snorfle*

A constant source of outrageous mondegreens is live captioning, particularly on breaking news events. (The sports captioners do the best job, and the local news is the worst.)

[noracharles]

Live captioning! That must be extremely difficult to do. I often don't understand what people are saying until I've heard the entire sentence.

[jesse_the_k]

It is hard to do right, for exactly that reason. The creators, (called stenocaptionists) use a special keyboard attached to computer software. (The same skills are used for court reporting.)

The operator types in sounds, which are expanded to words by the software, similar to T9 textphone abbreviation. In order to keep up, the operator tries to key in the sound as quickly as possible, not waiting for the end of the sentence.

The worst case is names: I've seen Isaac Asimov rendered "I sack him off". Unfortunately some captionists get around the names issue by never trying, so one sees a lot of "he" and "she" (and those are, of course, best guesses and often wrong).

[noracharles]

That is so interesting! I figured maybe it was done using some sort of stenographer's machine. That's really cool. I can see how names would be a problem, but it's a shame that they don't always try to type the names in.

I guess you have to use your imagination a lot to figure out what people are saying, if all you have to go on is the captioning. It must be particularly difficult for Deaf people whose English maybe isn't very good.

[jesse_the_k]

Yep, that's a stenographer's machine.

While there are many situations where using our imagination is a good thing, unfortunately, many of the places with live captioning are not among them. For example: med school lectures, court proceedings, church.

It's standard for court reporters & legislative transcribers to edit their transcriptions before submitting them as "the official record," but AFAIK, no live captioning is ever edited (even when the show is rebroadcast a year later)!

Deaf children commonly test at the 4th grade reading level, so figuring out what's meant for "i sack him off" assumes a too high a level of meta-understanding.

(One of the reasons why sports captionists look so good is there's a limited name space, and they load all the likely names into the software before they begin the show.)