Kevin The Poyner? Subtitles on TV leaving fans confused
FOOTBALL fans watching subtitled Premier League action over the festive break would have been forgiven for wondering whether gremlins had taken hold of the system.
The World Cup winner George Cohen, whose death was marked with a minute’s silence around the grounds, was transcribed as George Owen.
Anyone watching Manchester United’s win over Nottingham Forest would have seen the pundit Patrice Evra presented as Patrice Vieira, while Kevin de Bruyne was named both The Poyner and Kevin to Breiner during Manchester City’s win at Leeds.
The errors did not end there, the typists employed by Amazon Prime to transcribe the commentary apparently struggling with Ally McCoist’s contributions. During the match at Elland Road, the former Scotland international listed some of his most celebrated compatriots to have played for Leeds, including Billy Bremner, Joe Jordan, Eddie Gray and Gordon Strachan, only for the subtitles to overlook the list entirely and wait for the commentary to return to the action.
Such poor captioning is not the preserve of live football, of course. Broadcasters have fallen prey to them as long as the service has been available. The more memorable in recent times have included the BBC describing the official mode of royal transport as ‘cabbages’ rather than carriages, presenter Dan Walker noting the British fondness for ‘killing’ during Wimbledon, even though he said ‘queuing’.
Amazon say they employ palantypists, or speech-to-text reporters, rather than use artificial intelligence. These trained experts are said to provide more reliable subtitles than those systems that rely on AI.
Sky Sports employ ‘respeakers’ who repeat the commentary in a studio for AI to then transcribe it. The BBC are also said to use a team of respeakers, apparently a point of contention in the captioning industry because they are cheaper. ‘If I have a client who says, “I think you’re using a respeaker”, they mean that in a derogatory fashion because the captions don’t quite flow in the same way, unless you have a very good respeaker,’ says Victoria Ward, of the company 121 Captions.
‘This is usually because the speakers are either tidying what the AI has said or they’ve trained the AI to respond to short, coded words, which leads to AI providing captions that are chunky.
‘It’s often also hard to find typists with the knowledge of the subject they’re covering. You have to really dig around. Otherwise, mistakes creep in. If you’re a speech-to-text reporter, you’ve had to go through four years of training. You’ve had to invest in a specialist [stenography] machine, and they’ll often have two as a back-up. But we still get applicants for work who’ve done an online course for 16 weeks.’
The mistakes committed during last week’s football might have been comical for some, but according to the Royal National Institute for Deaf People 12 million people are registered deaf or hard of hearing in the UK.
Rebecca Mansell, chief executive of the British Deaf Association, said: ‘Unfortunately the quality is all too often unacceptably poor. Try switching the sound off your TV and following the gobbledygook yourself!
‘Subtitles are not only vital for deaf, deafened and hard-of-hearing people, but also for older people and those for whom English is not a first language.’