Bbc News 24 Live Subtitles

lankeela | 00:18 Sun 06th Oct 2019 | Film, Media & TV

6 Answers

Don't know who writes them but having watched a few news bulletins live this past few weeks there have been some very bad mistakes made, and they seem to leave names out if they are not easy to spell. I wondered if it was some sort of voice recognition that translates them.

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Buenchico

Pedantic note: 'BBC News 24' dropped the '24' bit eleven years ago. It's just been 'BBC News' ever since then.

Subtitling on BBC news programmes is done by a professional subtitler 'revoicing' what is said. i.e. he/she repeats what he hears, while simultaneously listening to the next bit of speech. ('Revoicing' eliminates both background noise and accents). He/she also has to control the colour of the words on the screen, so that different colours are used for different people. As he/she does so, a computer's voice recognition program then converts his words to text, which the subtitler also has to keep an eye on in order to check that the correct text is appearing.

So, at any one time, the subtitler is listening to one person speaking, while revoicing what the previous person has said, controlling the text colours on screen and trying to check that the subtitles are appearing correctly. It's probably no surprise that they can only work in 15-minute stints!

https://www.radiotimes.com/news/tv/2018-05-16/how-do-tv-subtitles-work/

andy-hughes

Further to Chris's excellent and informed response, I would suggest that the ignoring of difficult names is simply a means of not spending valuable seconds working out pronunciation for the software, which would then mean that the decode operator would be too far behind the dialogue ever to catch up.