That 70s captioned show: how the news was first brought to Deaf Americans

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Friday, 28 March 2014 15:07pm

Following the release of our white paper on caption quality, we look back at the origins of television captioning.

The Captioned ABC News, which began on 3 December 1973, was the first news program ever captioned. It was a repeat of the ABC’s 6 p.m. news which went to air at 11 p.m., with the captions prepared by a team of five captioners.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcgqQj2wKFw

As can be seen in the example posted on YouTube, the captions differed significantly from the dialogue in the program. At the time, captioning standards were geared toward profoundly Deaf people whose first language was sign language. Captions were written so that the language was at a sixth grade reading level, with short words substituted for longer ones and idioms often replaced. Thus, in the bulletin from 1978, the word ‘ayatollah’ has been omitted from a story about Iran, ‘surreptitiously’ has been replaced by ‘secretly’ and ‘on French soil’ has become ‘in France’.

When captioning began in Australia in 1983, it was still considered necessary to simplify language. Adult programs were captioned at a rate of 120 words per minute (or two words a second), which entailed considerable rewriting of the dialogue. Since then, the trend internationally has been to increase word speeds so that most of the original dialogue is retained, and today most news programs are captioned close to verbatim.

Our white paper, Caption Quality: International approaches to standards and measurement, looks at the development of caption standards over the years, compares the standards currently in place in Australia and other countries, and recommends ways in which the captioning of news and current affairs programs in particular can be improved.


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