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Up there Kazakhstan

Nine's closed captioning gets a sense of humour. Can we have more of this please?

cazalyBit of a bizarre -only on The Footy Show- moment last night when Nine’s closed captioning decided to have a sense of humour.

During Mike Brady singing his anthemic Up There Cazaly the text on the bottom of the screen, intended for hearing-impaired viewers, actually had the words “Up there Kazakhstan.”

What the?

Is closed captioning always this funny? Nine could start a new trend with this kind of embedding humour.

Today Mike Brady said, “I think Up There Cazaly has a whole new ring to it.”

But seriously it was very out of place and disrespectful to the good folk of Kazakhstan, already battling an image word down by Borat.

But we loved it all the same…..

Source / photo: The Age

16 Responses

  1. Sure do Jordan, but the times i witnessed it the text from the captioning had nothing to do with the gameplay, or what any commentator was saying. I know Robert Walls and Malcolm Blight are prone to speaking jibberish themselves, but some of the captioning comments were eye opening (sexual orientation among them).

    It has happened on more than one occasion, admittedly i havn’t seen it occur over the past few months.

  2. Paul, do you realise how fast a captioner’s brain has to react in order to transcribe someone’s (and, in many cases, multiple people’s) speech? You really think they have time to pick and choose what text appears in order to exercise some devious ‘agenda’? They transcribe what is being Spoken not what action is being Shown onscreen. If anyone is being aggressive towards certain players, it is the commentator whose words the captioner is transcribing! Save your conspiracy theories for politics.

  3. @SomeoneBBBA – Closed captioning started with 7-text about 30 years ago I think. You need either a TV with Teletext and go to page 801, or a newer TV with built-in captioning access.

  4. I saw The Prodigy do a live version of (early single) ‘One Love’ on a music show that had the lyrics on closed captioning. On screen was just the one line that flashed on and off the screen for the whole song :

    “G-G-G-G-G-G-G-G-G-G-G-G-Give me the bassline”

    Couldn’t believe someone actually bothered with the effort!

  5. Subtitles on live shows are always weird, especially if the talking head has an accent. Don’t know if they try to use some speech-to-text software or what, but often it’s hilarious. “The Prime Minister said he was, ah, checking…” came up as “the Prime Minister said he was a chicken…”

  6. they were talking about it on the radio this morning, that because the subtitlers do the captions in a type of phonetic shorthand that is how it came up like that on screen. I guess they didn’t have a shorthand for Cazaly!

    Does remind me though of an episode of The Panel where they realised that one of the subtitlers had obviously got a bit bored or was finding it too hard to keep up with what was being said, so they ended up just writing “blah blah blah” across the screen!

  7. Some closed captioners do have a sense of humour…. or some kind of agenda. I havn’t noticed it recently as i’ve been too lazy to press the subtitle button on the remote to check. But i used to play with the subtitles button during sporting events (mainly afl) just to see how the text on screen – stays with the commentary.

    A lot of what was said by the commentators, was barely acknowledged – nor the current action on the ground. Rather whomever was doing the closed captions were being very aggressive towards their opinions of certain players who were playing on the night.

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