(written September 12, 2001)
You learn a mind-altering truth in 11 years of closed-caption
editing, namely that it is so EASY for you to be wrong: to make a
typo, to mishear audio, to mistakenly I.D. one speaker as another.
The captioning novice believes their transcriptions are faultless
because of their mind's preference for making sense of text rather
than analyzing it, but a letter-by-letter analysis of their caption
files typically tells another story: their work is, in fact, riddled
with a variety of errors (some major, many minor). Their mind, it
turns out, has been seeing pretty much what it expected to see, not
what was actually there.
From this mental tendency, the thoughtful captioner will draw a moral
applicable to life in general, the mind-altering truth of which I
write: that fallibility and presumption are "written in" to the human
program lest we (Rain Man-like) obsess on details, and that humility,
forbearance, and tolerance are therefore the sorts of traits that are
appropriate to the human species. It's a humbling moral, if you're
willing to admit it to yourself, as any first-rate captioner must
eventually do.
I think of this truth whenever human beings turn evil in purported
defense of their own "certainties," how suffering might have been
avoided if they'd recognized what, after all, is neurological fact:
that like the novice captioner, unbeknownst to themselves and against
all evidence of their senses, they could be wrong about something,
too!
About the Author (webmaster bylines):
Brian Quass, a senior closed-caption editor in Alexandria, Virginia,
is one of a handful of veteran editors in the field of "offline"
captioning (the captioning of prerecorded television programs and
videos). He is also a prolific author, having produced near-daily
articles for his own websites since 1997. http://www.quass.com