So I'm going to talk a little bit about standards
for what I'm calling transcription, and then
afterwards, captions.
And when I use "transcription" here,
it's more to describe the actual act of transcribing the audio,
as compared to a transcription that would have no time stamps
or anything like that.
So right now, there's no sort of universally accepted style
guide for how the audio should be transcribed.
So we have standards that we use here
and that seem to be applied throughout the captioning
universe.
I think the first one that's very basic
and that is applied everywhere is
that spelling should be at least 99% accurate
and that in the text, both uppercase and lowercase letters
should be used.
It's easier to read, and it's better
for reading comprehension.
The other thing that we like to do
is when multiple speakers are present, it's
good to show when there's a speaker change if everyone's
onscreen, and if someone's speaking offscreen,
to identify them somehow with a label.
So you might be using, when speakers change,
a dash to indicate that there's a new speaker talking,
if everyone's onscreen, or a double carrot.
And when they're offscreen, you might
have the name of the person actually speaking
and then the text that they say, just
to help with comprehension for the person who's
reading the captions.
And the other thing with speaker labels
is that you want to make sure, if you are labeling someone
who's offscreen or on the telephone,
that you're not actually revealing a plot point.
So if there's a mysterious caller calling in
on a horror movie, you certainly wouldn't
want to say the name of the murderer if at the beginning
it's just a mysterious voice.
So you always want to be keeping the plot in mind
as you are transcribing the audio content, to make it
so that it'll be most comprehensible for the person
reading the captions without actually revealing
plot points too early.
The other thing that you want to make sure you do,
which distinguishes captions from subtitling,
is that you want to capture non speech sounds.
So if there's music playing, you want to put that in.
If there's laughter in the room, you want to be including that.
Sounds like that we typically set off with square brackets
to show that it's a sound.
And again, sound effects that are pertinent to the plot
should be included.
But you don't need to capture every single background
noise that's happening in the film or show, as that
can be distracting.
So an example is if someone's sort of walking along
the street, and you see them, and they
happen to have their keys in their hand,
and you hear the keys jingling, you certainly
don't need to put in that sound effect.
But if someone's in a room and you
hear offscreen that keys are jingling to open a door,
you want to include that because that's part of the plot,
and the person onscreen may then react to that.
Another example is if someone's in a busy bullpen
in a newsroom, so there are telephones ringing everywhere,
you don't need to capture every telephone that rings
in the background, unless it's affecting
the plot as it happens.
So that's something to keep in mind.
You also want to make sure that you're using punctuation
for maximum clarity.
That's pretty self-explanatory.
But you don't want to put in a descriptor.
So if someone's shouting, you don't want to put, "SHOUTING,
Hi."
Then that's taking up a lot of caption frame.
If you can convey that with punctuation,
so just "Hi" with an exclamation point, then that's much better.
And that's more clear for the person
who is reading the captions and also
trying to watch the program at the same time.
The other thing that you want to do
is if someone is speaking with an accent
throughout the whole film, you don't necessarily
want to be transcribing their speech phonetically.
If someone has a thick accent, if you're
transcribing every word phonetically because it isn't,
quote unquote, "proper English," that becomes very hard to read.
So you still want to be adhering to normal spelling of words.
If someone does happen to put on a fake accent for a scene
or a line or two, you can denote that in parentheses
to say that they're speaking with a Scottish accent
or something like that, to convey
that it's not the typical way that they speak.
The other thing that Josh mentioned earlier
was that you want to be as close to verbatim as possible.
So you want to be capturing as much of the content
as you can that makes sense.
So for a scripted show, you would
be including every "um" that a person says,
every stutter, every stammer, because it's intentionally
said.
The movie's been edited that way.
There's a little more leeway for reality shows and documentaries
that have interviews with people.
Because people don't speak proper English.
And if they're saying "um" every other word,
and that's in the captions, it becomes very
hard to digest that content.
But any scripted show definitely should be verbatim.
And even any reality show or documentary show
should be as close as possible to verbatim without capturing
every single stammer and stutter that makes
the captions difficult to read.
And then finally, some quick standards, actually,
for how the captions should be presented.
The font style should be a non serif,
such as Helvetica medium.
Each caption frame should hold one to three lines
of text onscreen at a time.
So it shouldn't fill up the whole screen, because you still
want to see the action that's happening on the screen.
Each line should not exceed 32 characters.
The minimum duration should be at least one second
so the person has time to actually read the caption.
And then if there's extended sound effects,
like there's music playing, a full song is playing,
you don't want to keep up that whole caption on the screen
the whole time.
So you want that to drop off after four or five seconds.
And then each caption frame should
be replaced by another caption, unless there's
a long period of silence.
So again, same thing with that music tag--
if someone speaks and then there's 15 seconds of silence,
you don't want their caption frames to hang out onscreen
throughout that whole silence.
It makes it look like they talked for longer than they
did, and it's unnecessary.
All caption frames should be precisely time synched
to the audio, so they should appear when the person speaks.
And when they start the next sentence,
the new caption frame should come
on, or the next part of that sentence.
And then finally, caption frames should be repositioned
if it obscures onscreen text.
So if there's burned in subtitles, for instance,
we have the ability to then move those caption frames that we'd
normally have on the bottom up to the top of the screen to not
obscure the onscreen burned in