This is the best
question of all! When you are viewing realtime captions,
it’s hard to imagine that a person could possibly have the skill to write as fast as
people are speaking, identify who is speaking, and use that little stenotype machine with
22 keys to represent ALL oral speech.
Let me give you a quick lesson to show you exactly how this works.
The stenotype
keyboard is composed in such a manner that the court reporter uses the left
hand to begin the sound, the thumbs to insert vowels, and the right hand to end the sound
– all simultaneously as the speech is heard.
If you look at this
sample stenotype keyboard, you can see keys on the left, the vowels at the bottom,
and keys on the right.
Now, for example, if you were to write the word cat, since court reporters
write phonetically, they would place their left ring finger over the K,
their left thumb over the A and their right little finger over the T,
and all exactly at the same time strike those keys, and KAT would read out
on their paper. That is simple enough to
understand, isn’t it? If you were in
class, the teacher would tell you to find the K, find the A,
and find the T, and when you had your fingers positioned above all three,
strike the keys. (Eventually you would get
faster – a heck of a lot faster!)
Well, now you might look at the keyboard and realize there are a lot of keys missing
to create beginning, vowel and ending sounds.
So what’s a court reporter to do?
They use combinations of keys. Let
me just explain one word that aptly demonstrates this concept. The word gleam. You will notice there is no G on the
left side. And there is no L. And on the right side, the side that ends the
sounds, there is no M. So gleam
is written TKPWHRAOEPL and that’s exactly how it prints on the
court reporter’s paper. The court
reporter can read that back, and the computer can translate that back into English
because: TKPW = G, and HR
= L, and AOE = a long “e” sound, and PL = a
final “m” sound. Isn’t
that easy to understand? The court reporter
strikes all those keys all at once. It takes
no more time than striking KAT.
Now on to my next
point. Why are there sometimes
mistakes?
First, if the court reporter’s fingers were to miss one letter -- just one essential
letter in that word gleam -- then the translation would not work and
you would either get a word that doesn’t translate or an incorrect word. Consider that court reporters are often writing at
200 plus words per minute. Occasional
mistakes will occur. Court reporters are
generally certified at anywhere between 95 and 97.5% accuracy. That’s pretty good considering most do a lot
better than that and the volume of words that they capture at any given time.
Secondly, the captioner doesn’t have the luxury of asking someone to repeat
what they said or interrupt if they can’t quite hear something. Court reporters are
human, and it's actually a darn good thing that they bring human reasoning to their
skills.
Consider the
following:
2 B oar naught two bee
Two bee ore knot 2
“B”
Too be or not two bee
To be or not
to be
Now, that's only six little English words! Can you see just how difficult
capturing spoken language accurately can be?
Understanding Live Captioning!
Weer Not Bad Spelerz - by Patty White
