close captioning any info???

[Joelle]

hello all!

I am a real time reporter in Manhattan, New York, Trying to break in to the close captioing market. Been calling and emailing many, many places and cannot get info. all I am getting is at home CDs and kits. LLooking for a company that will train and hire. I called Vitac but asked me to call back in a few months.

Willing to go to any state, country

thanks, any info would be helpful

[Denise C.]

I was just relaying information that was told to me when I took a realtime instruction course online years ago.  Sorry if I got it wrong.    I'm no expert, was just trying to help out.  I will defer any comments about captioning and leave it to the experts.  I'm just a reporter who isn't high-tech.

[Mary Ann Payonk]

Denise, I don't want to get in too much hot water for giving my opinion!  But captioners need to be able to write any and everything that comes up, and extremely quickly for a job that lasts 15 to 30 minutes. I would venture to say there's not a lot of time to edit what you're writing as you're writing, although in Eclipse I'm quite sure it can be done.  In litigation work, there are pauses and shifts and the job lasts all day long.  It's not leisurely, but it's a heck of a lot different than TV.  

Re: prep time, my prep time for realtime jobs isn't compensated either.  I get a caption and a witness name, occasionally an eTranscript from a previous day.  I google my case, my witness, and both attys while I'm at it.  I make a job dict for the next day and flip through the eTran to get a feel for what we'll be talking about.  Most of my stuff already involves high-end patent litigation, so the rare case-specific word goes into my dict, fully written out and also as a brief form of my own choosing (I do not use computer-suggested auto briefs).

Everything in my dict goes into my personal dict, including 99.9% of case-specific words, or obscure words and phrases, because I know eventually they will come back again, and while no one in the room would notice or give a damn, five months from now when I again have the occasion to write the pleneulatum of atorvastatin calcium, and it comes out right, I'll be grinning from ear to ear.

Everything in a captioner's dict goes in their dict probably as well, except that it's extremely important for them to have separate dictionaries -- sports, weather, food, home improvement, politics.  Some words can go into the main dict, but there might be some brief forms they wish to use for these other categories.  And I'll venture to say that within sports, they might have baseball, hockey, football broken out.  They might also have a dict for separate teams, like sports/hockey/pittsburgpenguins and sports/hockey/buffalosabres.  If they are captioning Superbowl, the might have a separate Superbowl dict with the names and brief forms for many older players of the past, the stadium names, and words from some of the great Superbowls of the past that might come up.  I doubt a litigation reporter would delve that deep into having so many dictionaries to deal with on a daily basis.  For me, it's my main dictionary and then also my case-specific job dictionary.  That's it.

So about compensation.  I'm supremely happy working on the litigation side, but I know many realtime reporters who want to move to the broadcast captioning side because work is slow to nonexistent in their area, and page rates have fallen to levels lower than 15 years ago.  I also know several broadcast captioners and CART providers who are happy doing what they're doing, but they want to start doing depositions as well because the hourly compensation for broadcast captioning they feel is painfully low and frankly not appropriate for the amount of time and money put into the effort, to get such low hourly rates in return.  If someone is interested in words and words alone, writing them on the machine, then money will not matter to them.  I love doing that, but to me, it's all about the money, and I'm not afraid to say it.  And it's a wickedly competitive world out there as well.  With work slacking off in many places, there are lots of reporters trolling for any work they can get.  And I said all of that to reinforce your own statement that you want to be the best you can be.  If you become the very best in your field, then you will be greatly in demand for your work by companies who care about quality.  And believe me when I say there are still companies, agencies out there who care about quality.

So hang in there, set out on the right path, be the very best you can be, and enjoy the ride to the top.

M.A.

[Janet]

 

M.A. is right.  You can't just jump from one to the other (captioning or litigation) without training.  One comment that Judy Brentano made to me is that she can always tell when watching captioning if it's a litigation reporter who jumped in too soon.  She said she'd see things like "burden of proof" popping up in captions.  There is a good amount of dictionary work that should be done before starting.  The news and weather are a whole different ball game, full of terms that never come up in litigation reporting. 

 

I signed up for the Vitac bootcamp years ago, but I didn't end up going at the time.  I'm actually glad that I took the two-month course instead.  I just completed the course in November 2011.  It gave me time to do the dictionary work and a whole lot of practice time on the news, weather, shopping network, and sports.  The segments on TV are usually 15 minutes before a commercial break.  I had to build stamina to be able to write 15 minutes at high speeds without the normal pauses or change in speed in a litigation setting.   That takes time. 

 

Have you started practicing with the news?   You can always start your prep now, before taking a formal course.

 

 

[Denise C.]

Oh my gosh!  I spelled PIttsburgh wrong!  I need to go back to work.  I'm from Erie and I didn't even spell Pittsburgh correctly?

I have to stop reading.  It's like a transcript:  Once you submit it, you never look at it again!  YIKES~

[Denise C.]

By the way, I kind of disagree that rarely anything is spoken at 180 words per minute.  I was thrown into cross-examination that was very, very fast and that's why the officials took off that day!

[Denise C.]

rudimentary -- how do you edit?  AArgh!

[Denise C.]

Hi, Mary Ann, my understanding of the captioning world -- just a very rudimetary understanding -- is that the prep work involved is very time consuming for which you are not paid.  I may be wrong since I have no experience in this field.  BUT, I would think as a a reporter, like myself, I would want it to be the best I can produce and, therefore, I am a victim to the prep work.  I don't know, just what I heard a long time ago.  I can't imagine going on a show with no prep work.  AND I also heard -- just hearsay -- that as the day goes on, like on CNN Headline News, the captioning gets better because they clean it up as the news repeats itself.  I'm just recalling from memory years and years ago.

[Mary Ann Payonk]

Hi, Joelle.  I think reporters on both sides will agree ... litigation realtime is a specialty, and broadcast captioning is a specialty.  There are things one side knows that the other side simply may not - and it doesn't make them less of a good writer.  But there's a lot more to broadcast captioning than being a good writer.  Bring a broadcast captioner into the deposition suite and hand them a StenoCast wireless system and five netbooks and tell them to connect everyone for realtime, two attys with their own laptops, and oh, by the way, doing Internet realtime today.  That's cruel and unusual punishment.  Tell a deposition reporter, even a topnotch realtime reporter, that they'll be writing remotely with Skype as well as an encoder with connection and display issues so they'll have to reset everything on their end for this one particular client.  That's just as bad.  

Both litigation realtime and broadcast captioning require good, solid realtime writing.  Fingerspelling is an absolute must for captioning, not so much on the litigation side.  At this point in my career, I limit my work to realtime only, and for litigation cases that merit realtime, my experience is more with seasoned litigators, more likely partners, and higher end witnesses testifying in patent and business law matters.  And yes, although there are occasional very bad apples, it's very controlled and generates about 300 pages in a day.  So the speeds are high average.  Look at TV, on the other hand.  Litigation is full of the same words every day - easy.  Watch the news tonight, though.  TV is full of names, places, cities, towns, foreign and domestic.  Holy crap!  And they have a lot to pack into a half-hour or hour show, so yes, they are going to be flying sometimes.

Quality standards are being implemented by some (most definitely not all, but certainly some) broadcast captioning agencies, and they are wise not to accept any realtime reporter to cover their work.  You can't just walk into it without having specialized training and experience, you really can't.  So excellent idea to pursue that training.

Oh, and remember that some of the garbage that we see on TV comes from captioning agencies who hire unskilled, unqualified writers who haven't even made it out of school yet.  Also, did you know that some TV captioning is done by computer, by voice recognition?  That's why it's so awful.

Best of luck to you!

M.A.

[Denise C.]

Joelle, I can't understand why you're not getting a response if you're a realtime reporter.  Have you ever seen the garbage on the TV?  I remember watching the president's speech once.  I mean, how fast is that?  It was riddled with mistake after mistake.  Made me feel pretty good, actually!  HA!

[Joelle]

thanks Janet, I saw many online courses, I'm not that diciplined lol and I have a small child. But I will check it out.

Denise, the thought of not having to get dressed and look presentable is fantastic!! QVC and HSN are super fast. A little intimidating. I think after doing depos and arbitrations, and federal grand jury work the average is 180WPM. Anyone disagree?