It seems that 90% of captioning is
names. Ah, names, names, names. I often wonder what happened to the simple
names, like Mary Jones or Joe Smith. In
broadcast captioning, I am never surprised to learn those names could be
spelled Marey Jonez or Jo Smyth. It’s
enough to make you crazy. The good news
is most captioning companies use all caps, so you do not have to have separate
entries in your dictionary to distinguish between bill/Bill, pat/Pat, or
bob/Bob. The bad news is sometimes you
have to get very creative to distinguish between Antoine (Walker ),
Antwan (Harris), Antawn (Jamison), and Antwuan (Dixon ), all sports figures. I’m not making this up. I actually did a NCAA basketball in which
three of the above players were playing in the same game. The strokes you choose to distinguish the
different spellings are not important; what’s important is that you remember
them.
Enter: Post-It notes.
Ah, the all-important “cheat sheets.”
I use them often, and I use them in great numbers. They’re posted all over my office. Hey, whatever works.
Now, you can word-global Antawn + Jamison together. You can do that with all of the above
names. I have them all that way in my
Sports dictionary. However, when they
simply say AN/TWAN without the last name, you’ve got to have a unique stroke to
distinguish who they’re talking about.
And you’ve got to know who
they’re talking about. In the above
situation, I have a separate cheat sheet for similar names, indicating which
team they’re on, the color of their shirts, and their number. So when the announcer says AN/TWAN, I can
quickly determine which person is intended.
Of course, that has to be done within a matter of milliseconds. No problemJ
Because of all the names that come up in any one broadcast,
be it a sports program or news, it is doubly important to purge your dictionary
of multi-word phrases you’ve come so reliant on. I suggest creating a job dictionary called
Depositions or Court and moving those entries there so you can still use them
while you practice your captioning. Many
times, during a local newscast, for example, a non-famous person’s name is
mentioned. And if I can, I will either
fingerspell it (type one letter at a time which will glue together) or I’ll
type a series of strokes connected by delete space (I use TK-L, defined in my
dictionary as a delete space). Say the
name is Fosteter. I might stroke it out
as TPOS/TK-L/TET/ER. In the old days,
for me, that would have translated as “PHILOSOPHYAT THE TIMER.” Ugh, that would look just awful on the TV
screen being seen by perhaps millions!
Not to mention the deaf or hard-of-hearing viewer has no idea who or
what they’re talking about.
Briefs are fine for names that come up frequently. I use P-B/P-B for President Bush, J-B/J-B for
George W. Bush, D-FP/D-FP for Dick Cheney.
I keep these in my main dictionary.
B-K/B-K for Bill Clinton is still in my main dictionary even though his
term is up. He still comes up in the
news quite frequently. I just created a
brief for Bonny Lee Bakley, Robert Blake’s late wife. BL-B/BL-B will remain in my “Current”
dictionary until that case dies down.
However, I will leave the strokes for Bonny Lee Bakley (BON/AOE LAOE
BAEUK/LEU) in my main dictionary forever, as her name is bound to come up years
down the road and her first name is spelled with a “Y.”
My “Current” dictionary is a job dictionary that I put
entries of the day (or month or year in some cases). There are too many names to count related to
the September 11th attacks.
Osama Bin Laden (OB/OB) will remain in my main dictionary probably
forever, but many of the others will reside in my current dictionary probably
for a couple of years. I go through that
dictionary every couple of months and delete entries that are no longer in the
news. For sports, I have individual team
dictionaries, so R-K/R-K for Roger Clemens will always reside in my “New York
Yankees” dictionary. On game day, I
simply merge the two team dictionaries, the network dictionary with all the
speaker ID’s into a “game day” dictionary that might be called “Yankees and Red
Sox 040102.” Before I start the game, I
will write all my briefs to make sure they’re all in tact. It’s possible I used
R-K/R-K for a Red Sox player, in which case I’ll get rid of
that one, because Yankees players always supersede everyone else. That’s another story!
You may notice my briefs do not include vowels (with the
exception of OB/OB—see note below*). I
was in the habit of writing my briefs with vowels and now see why that is a bad
idea. Oftentimes, these briefs will
cause word boundary problems, or simply a mistroke can result in a double
stroke. Example: Let’s say you have KAR/KAR defined as Johnny
Carson in your dictionary. The sentence
should read: “She stayed at the Carlisle Hotel.” SHE STAEU/D AT –T KAR/LAOEL * KAR/LAOEUL
HOE/TEL. This may translate as “She
stayed at the Johnny
Carson Lyle
Hotel
*I know, I know, OB/OB contradicts everything I just
said. Well, what can I say? I’m not perfect. A couple of years ago, his name was coming up
a lot in the news. I came up with a
not-so-good stroke, and it stuck.
Fortunately (knock on wood), I haven’t had any problems with it, so for
now it stays!
Another challenging area related to names is the creation of
speaker identification. Some shows,
especially sports, require the captioner to distinguish one broadcaster from
another. Because of the speed of the
event, I use one-stroke briefs for speaker ID’s, and then I double it to get
the speaker’s full name. For example, I
define M-R to translate as >> Marv:
But when I stroke M-R/M-R, it will translate as Marv Albert. This is extremely helpful when he says, “Marv
Albert here, alongside Steve “Snapper” Jones and Bill Walton.” They do these intros terribly fast. Incidentally, I sometimes use triple strokes
for names that include a nickname. So
ST-F is >> Steve: and ST-F/ST-F is
Steve Jones, but ST-F/ST-F/ST-F is Steve “Snapper” Jones. I think speaker ID’s are the most difficult
part about writing sports. The key is, I
think, to choose strokes that are comfortable to stroke and easy to
remember.
Unfortunately, you may encounter more than one Mike or Tom
from the same network. As a rule, I try
to use their initials as my stroke, but that’s not always possible. A great solution I’ve come up with is to use
the OEU stroke for some. For example,
M-K is my Mac~ prefix, so I can’t use that for Mike. So I use M-RN for Mike Breen, because it
makes sense. But turns out Mike Dunleavy
is announcing the game with Mike Breen.
M-D is Monday. So I go with
MOEUK. It’s the only time I use vowels
in my speaker ID’s. I use POEUT for Pat
Croce and LOEUFP for Lewis Johnson. I
use BOEUB for Bobby Murcer and B-RB for Bob Murcer, as sometimes they like to
shake things up on me. You get the idea.
To wrap things up, the bottom line is there are several ways
to spell the same name. And just when
you think you’ve figured them all out, someone will pop up with yet another
way. I probably have five entries for
the name Christie (Kristy, Christy, etc.). I couldn’t tell you
what they are offhand. But I can tell
you they’re in there. A quick check at
the commercial break is all I need.
Until next time, happy captioning!
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