Real-Life Communication
Closed captioning is all about communicating. "You have to have
a great familiarity with language," says Teri Darrenougue, a closed captioner
in California. "You need to understand language and be able to use it easily."
Of
course, closed captioning has its own jargon that closed captioners must understand.
This is a memo your boss at the TV network has placed on your desk. Rewrite
her instructions in plain language, using the vocabulary list below.
Dear
Ted,
For the following recorded program, Zombies, we will use offline
captioning with the standard pop-on captions. Please have the submaster on
my desk by 3 p.m.
In the evening, we will be broadcasting the junior
world basketball championships and will need online captioning with roll-up
captions. This will mean I need you to do real-time captioning. Please make
sure your real-time dictionary is updated and ready to go by the time the
program begins.
Thanks,
Nell
Vocabulary
Offline
Captioning: The preparation of captions for recorded programming so that,
at the time of air or tape playback, the captions are part of the videotape.
The appearance of captions is usually "pop on." Captions are typically placed
in the upper and lower third of the TV screen.
Pop-on captions:
A phrase or sentence appears on the screen all at once, not line by line,
and stays there for a few seconds.
Online captioning: Captioning
that is provided at the time of program origination. This type of captioning
is frequently used for live programs.
Roll-up captioning: Roll-up
captions roll on and off the screen in a continuous motion. A maximum of four
lines of text can appear at one time. As a new line comes along, it appears
on the bottom, pushing the other lines on the screen up.
Real-time
captioning: Method of captioning where captions are simultaneously prepared
and transmitted at time of origination by specially trained real-time captioners
using a stenotype machine.
Real-time dictionary: A computerized
dictionary that is comprised of the phonetics and their corresponding English
that the captioner uses to build words and create punctuation. Real-time captioners
write phonetically. Similar to a piano, multiple keys are depressed on a steno
machine to create different word combinations. No two captioners write exactly
the same way.
Master: The original videotape of the final version
of a program. The master is the source videotape used to created a captioned
submaster.
Submaster: Any duplication created from the master
videotape. The captioned videotape is a submaster of the original.
(Vocabulary
from: National Captioning Institute)