I watched it on TCM just now, but not with captions.
If you see words and phrases onscreen that are phonetically similar to those being said on the audio track but don't come close to matching them, and they often don't even make any logical sense (at least in the context of the scene), then the captions are probably being generated by a voice-recognition computer program that listens to the audio and 'translates' based on what it THINKS it's 'hearing'.
This has been seen on episodes of "Adam-12" and "Dragnet" on MeTV. A caption comes out completely wrong although its pronunciation would be similar to what was actually being said. Colloquial expressions, slang phrases, and professional jargon are especially prone to this. Many of the mistranslations are quite comical. Being a computer, the caption generator has never participated in actual human situations, so when 'translating' an expression it doesn't know how to understand the characters-- who they are and what they're doing-- to figure out whether its initial 'translation' makes any sense there. (The early self-driving cars are having similar problems now.) Sometimes the captions just freeze and miss a few lines altogether, or go back and self-correct-- that's another tell-tale sign of this technique.
I would have hoped those in charge would respect this film enough to take the extra time and expense of creating 'real' (human-generated) captions for it. But maybe they haven't.
reply
share
cmashieldscapting
8 years ago
To me the caption job seemed better than a machine's capabilities--although they are getting pretty smart--but less than a person with good hearing, comprehension, and spelling skills in English should be capable of. And on well-known classic films, they should certainly get hold of a script if necessary for lines which are not completely intelligible.
And lookee here, there is one right online! http://www.screenplaydb.com/film/scripts/To%20Kill%20a%20Mockingbird.pdf How lazy can they be not to look?
I checked it because after Miss Maudie tells Jem that Atticus is one of those people born to do other people's unpleasant jobs for them, the caption has Jem saying, "So are we." I was sure that's not what he actually said, but couldn't tell what he did say. The script has it as, "Oh, well."
reply
share
shenandoahpride
8 years ago
Where did this script come from? It must be an earlier version from the one that was used.
reply
share