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Re: The job of captioning

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From: Karen Mardahl
Date: Nov 18, 2010 7:57AM


Audio quality is a good point, Jared.

On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 3:44 PM, Jared Smith < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> - YouTube performs very well with high quality audio. Poor audio will
> obviously result in poor transcription (this applies to human
> transcription as well). While the study randomized the videos used,
> there was no indication of audio quality submitted.
>

In my example, I transcribed a video by Bruce Lawson. YouTube will try to do
an auto-caption from any uploaded file, but the machine translation will
fail if the voice isn't perfect according to some sort of standard. Bruce
has a British accent. I think the machine translation failed for that
reason. This is rather US-centric of YouTube, though. They are starting out
with English only. They can't handle French, for example, at this time. Of
course, understanding and transcribing a voice is magical to me - I have no
clue as to how they do it. Still, I'd think British-y accents could be
handled. My curiosity would love to know how that works.

I also tried the caption feature at my former workplace. The speaker had a
good neutral English (she's from California), but there was some melodic
background music because it was a product launch. (Not my choice.) It was
faint, but I believe that was enough to choke the machine translation.
However, it was a pro-production, so there was a manuscript and it took a
total of 10 minutes from first video upload to final, reviewed & edited
captioned 2-minute video. Easy-peasy.

regards, Karen Mardahl