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Re: YouTube Captioned Video

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From: Zdenek, Sean
Date: Jan 20, 2011 3:12PM

Janet,

Thanks for sharing this video. The captions are precisely timed and accurate but I think the overall quality of the captions could be improved. I don't want to nitpick but you did ask for feedback. :) If you created the caption file yourself, then you can address these issues easily.

In some cases, the end of a line or end of a caption is broken at an odd place. Individual lines and captions should be broken logically. That means keeping ideas, grammatical units, and word clusters together (adjectives with their nouns, prepositional phrases, etc.) whenever possible. See WGBH's guideline on creating logical line and caption breaks: http://main.wgbh.org/wgbh/pages/mag/services/captioning/faq/sugg-styles-conv-faq.html

See also Captioning Key's section on "line division": http://www.dcmp.org/captioningkey/text.html

For example,

At 0:19
"opportunities out there, even"

I would end the caption at the comma (i.e. the end of the clause), and drop "even" to the next caption.

At 0:28
"There's still food science
jobs out there."

I would include the noun ("jobs") on the same line as its modifiers ("food science").

At 1:04:
"can help make food safer
or help make food more"

I would include the first word from the next caption ("nutritious") in order to complete the thought here - i.e. add the adjective to the end of the caption ("help make food more nutritious").

There are more examples like these in your video but you get the idea. Attending to where lines and captions break is ultimately about how quickly and how well readers comprehend what they're reading.

Thanks,

Sean