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Hi again Tracy,

You asked about transitioning into captioning, but to be honest I didn't really transition so much as fall into it! RTE, you may remember the Late Late Show from your youth here :) wanted to begin live captioning and contacted the agency I was with, who happened to be the only agency in the country at the time. They asked if anyone was interested in captioning and three of us said yes. I was picked to go to NCI for some training and we began working with RTE soon after that, just the three of us, however quite soon after that the other two decided to quit, then the agency decided to quit, so I contacted RTE and said I'd continue, and that's how I became an agency owner too :)

But seriously, the main thing about the transition is you have to change from being a verbatim writer to a non-verbatim writer. We're trained to take down everything, and the move to captioning means changing to just taking down an edited version. Depending on the type of work you're doing, for example some sports, there may not be much commentary so you can still write verbatim. But some shows, like chat shows, are very "wordy" and so if you wrote it verbatim it would fly across the screen and be too difficult for people to read, so it's the less is more approach - write the sense of what's being said as opposed to the exact words.

Not sure if that's been any help at all, but if you need more information please feel free to contact me on my email, michelle@pcr.ie

Hi Tracy,
Nice to "meet" you :)