Captioning research calls for international industry standard
Red Bee Media has sponsored the first research paper to review, compare and contrast different regulations for captioning quality around the world. The whitepaper by Media Access Australia calls for more detailed international discussions on captioning to help reach an international standard.
The announcement:
Sydney, Australia – 31 March 2014 – Red Bee Media, one of the world’s leading media services companies, is supporting the industry call for more detailed cross border discussions between regulators to standardise high-quality captioning of live television and online digital video content, as well as other access services.
Welcoming the release of a whitepaper by Media Access Australia, Caption Quality: International Approaches to Standards and Measurement, that details the different international approaches to caption quality standards and measurements, Red Bee Media Australia Managing Director Chris Howe said international standards for benchmarking live-captioning services in particular were an important step, and offers Australia an opportunity to lead the market in terms of developing its captioning standards.
Chris Howe, Managing Director, Red Bee Media Australia said: “Australia is ahead of the European market in terms of implementing hybrid or block captioning, especially in broadcast news and current affairs programming.
“Red Bee Media has been at the forefront of caption technology and the development of hybrid methodologies (referred to in the report) for captioning systems for live-captioning – and the company plays an important role in developing standards for caption delivery.”
He notes that Australia is also one of the first markets to update its Broadcasting Services Act to include legislation regarding caption quality standards so that they are meaningful to viewers.
“Australia performs well in traditional broadcast areas with live captioning, but on the emerging digital platforms there are still plenty of opportunities for improvement in the standards for live captioning across all platforms. Also, consumers of captioned digital content can be anywhere in the world – regardless of where the content was produced – and a consistency of standards across national boundaries makes business sense.”
For content producers, who increasingly sell product into global markets, consistent and high-quality captioning across national boundaries is a key ingredient to successfully reaching their audience, Mr Howe said.
“Live captioning is an inherently challenging task and it’s unrealistic to expect 100 percent accuracy with zero delay. Red Bee Media Australia is committed to the process of ongoing development and investment in the tools and systems – and in training the highly-skilled people to use them – because demand for these services continues to grow.”
The Media Access Australia whitepaper, which was sponsored by Red Bee Media, is the first research paper to review, compare and contrast the different regulatory environments for captioning quality from around the world.
Alex Varley, Chief Executive Officer, Media Access Australia said: “This report clearly shows that for captioning quality standards to be effective and delivering for consumers they need to be grounded in practical reality and an understanding of the television production environment. Metrics have their place but too much focus on trying to quantify all aspects of quality leads to problems as suppliers and their clients look only to meet a number and forget about the viewer who is ultimately using their service.”
Among its recommendations, the whitepaper encouraged greater international discussion and sharing of information between regulators to help standardise quality, and called for practical experimentation and field-testing of different approaches to be encouraged.
The white paper also recommended that consumers of captioning services be given a greater role in the decision-making around caption presentation. The white paper, Caption Quality: International Approaches to Standards and Measurement can be downloaded from the Media Access Australia website, www.mediaccess.org.au
Red Bee Media is one of the world’s largest providers of access services. More information about Red Bee Media’s portfolio can be found at www.redbeemedia.com.au/services.html.
Source: Red Been Media press release by Espresso Communications.
An issue that I find can occur with captioning where it is to localise content such as SBS’s subtitles is the use of “dialect-specific” or “nation-specific” captioning. In some European dramas that I have seen on SBS, I had noticed that the English subtitles were specifically “Australian-localised”. There may be situations where SBS gets the first “bite of the cherry” for a foreign-language program i.e. is the first broadcaster to show the program in an English-language market.
Here, they turn out English subtitles for it as part of preparing it for local screening and you end up with English-language subtitles that are slanted to the Australian English. Another English-language market may have to scour these subtitles to slant them to their dialect/
One key example of this was an episode of Inspector Rex involving a hit-and-run and one of the panel beaters were to move the affected car part elsewhere. The car being used was a Peugeot ute and the English-language subtitles referred to it as a ute as we say in Australia where as most other English-language countries would refer to the same vehicle as a pickup truck or pickup.
A good practice may be to identify caption/subtitle packages with a dialect identifier like EN-GB for British English or EN-AU for Australian English.
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