Closed Captioning Fail

July 31st, 2008

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51 Responses to Closed Captioning Fail

  1. JohnnyB on July 31st, 2008 at 6:36 am

    Fire makes me hot!

  2. Hoff on July 31st, 2008 at 8:22 am

    Wow, did they really put that on TV? That can’t be true

    • C on September 22nd, 2008 at 11:40 am

      Believe it or not, it is – I remember actually seeing this once on a TV at the gym I go to. I just managed to read it before the subtitles changed, and I was like “… Did I just read that right?”

      EPIC FAIL, on so many levels…

  3. sfs on July 31st, 2008 at 8:35 am

    Actually, ridiculous and blatant errors in closed captioning are extremely common – even in taped programs with weeks of post-production to get the captions right. On news broadcasts, the captions are typed live; it’s typical to see the captioner(s) deleting words and trying again. The caption machines have auto-complete for longer words, and a lot of the typists use it. However, ordinarily small typos can become very important when “corrected” to similarly spelled but radically different words. “Evacuating” to “ejaculating” is an entirely believable typo even on a post-produced taped show. For a live news broadcast, that might not have even been the most egregious typo of the show.

    • matth on January 27th, 2009 at 3:31 pm

      wow way to ruin a great fail…we dont need your lecture to see this…dumbass

      • yru on August 7th, 2009 at 5:17 pm

        But this is the truth. Watch a live television program and turn on the captions. There are tons of errors.

  4. Judas Iscariot on July 31st, 2008 at 9:04 am

    Anybody listen to the Beatles? “Why don’t we do it in the road”?

  5. Warren on July 31st, 2008 at 10:31 am

    Uhh …. I don’t think that’s the way you put out a fire.

  6. Justin on July 31st, 2008 at 11:38 am

    That might be the best englishfail I’ve seen on here yet.

  7. Justin on July 31st, 2008 at 12:41 pm

    A lot of the “closed captions” used on the news are not actually scripted. They use voice recognition software to put up the text on screen live as it is being said. It is generally accurate but does sometimes produce errors, as in this case.

    • Michael on October 2nd, 2008 at 11:32 am

      Wow. You fail at your knowledge of the captioning process. There is not a single captioning company that would ever — EVER — use voice recognition for a live broadcast. All live news feeds are captioned by court reporters on steno machines. Every. Single. One.

      Sincerely,
      10-year captioner.

  8. Jason on July 31st, 2008 at 1:33 pm

    Firefighters care when people in the middle of the road talk suddenly and vehemently?

  9. Luxornv on July 31st, 2008 at 2:44 pm

    Was it some kind of flaming vagina?

  10. Harry Anslinger on July 31st, 2008 at 6:20 pm

    Can we just go ahead and make this one the all time funniest fail?

  11. Nozomi on August 2nd, 2008 at 12:30 am

    Holy God, I wish I could have seen that. Actually, I wish I could have seen, DVRed, and shown all my friends that.

  12. Bumble Bee Guy on August 2nd, 2008 at 8:51 pm

    This is quite possibly the best one yet!

  13. Daver on August 3rd, 2008 at 6:11 am

    I’m hard of hearing and use close captioning all the time. I’ve stopped watching TV news because the captioning is quite bad for real-time shows. The voice recognition software is poor, and human transcriptionists can’t keep up. One notable error: “President Bush” was transcribed as “blow fish”.

    • coleslaw on December 15th, 2008 at 7:50 am

      XD

  14. Tom on August 3rd, 2008 at 6:37 am

    Jason, perhaps you should look up the definition of the word ejaculating.. whilst you’re at it also look up semen, orgasm and sexual intercourse.

    • Canaduck on January 1st, 2009 at 2:43 pm

      Maybe YOU ought to look up the meaning of “ejaculation”. It has two.

  15. Luanne on August 3rd, 2008 at 8:33 am

    LOL Judas. I thought of that, too.

  16. Gangsta Rapers - Page 2 - IaBT Forums on August 5th, 2008 at 3:10 am

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  17. tiggy on August 7th, 2008 at 9:37 am

    this one is totally my favorite. i had to show it to everyone i know.

  18. thomashauk on August 8th, 2008 at 1:58 pm

    The picture on the left just makes all the funnier

  19. Vince on August 10th, 2008 at 10:05 pm

    Actually, ejaculating can mean either ‘exclaiming loudly’, or the other, more obvious sexual meaning. It is seldom used any more, in the same way we don’t call roosters cocks and donkeys asses. I think the English language is the easiest to screw up, because it has many rules with endless exceptions.

    Either way, this is pretty hilarious :)

  20. d00d on September 5th, 2008 at 1:59 pm

    lmao!

  21. Fred Garvin on September 5th, 2008 at 3:03 pm

    Def Leppard’s song coming under fire.

    Then in Foolin’

    It says the flames have died and the fire is gone.

  22. crtrptr on September 8th, 2008 at 9:07 pm

    Actually, closed captions for live shows (news, etc.) are created either by steno machine writers or with voice recognition (not as prevalent). Steno writers write by phonetics, and even the best steno writers make the occasional mistakes. This one, if you know steno, is very easy to understand. The steno (phonetically) for “evacuating” is E/VAK/YAIGT (written out long, and the “-ing” suffix is in the last stroke as “G”). It’s very easy to write a “J” for the “V” in the second stroke. That’s how you get the “ejaculating” instead of “evacuating.”

    If it was voice recognition, then it’s not as easy to explain. The “J” sound is very harsh compared to the “V” sound. I guess they could have misspoke it. But I bet this was a steno captioner.

    • TouchTricks_com on October 8th, 2008 at 9:46 pm

      The CBS affiliate that I used to work for… the scripts read by each of the reporters WAS the closed-caption feed… so the HUMAN REPORTER… wrote the story to fit the time they had for their live segements… and the CLOSED CAPTION was sent out as they turned their tele-prompter. FYI. :o ) — tooooooo funny though

  23. Bookmarks about Captioning on October 10th, 2008 at 1:00 am

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  24. asldfkalsdf on October 15th, 2008 at 2:23 am

    Closed captioning fails aren’t hard to find, but this one is great.

  25. TheAndySan on October 20th, 2008 at 10:05 pm

    Well, you know when I see a large fire, I can’t resist jerkin’ the gherkin, even if it’s in the middle of the road.

    I’m subscribing!

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  27. TheOneFreeman on December 10th, 2008 at 4:41 pm

    Ohhh, FIRE! It turns me ON!

    God, that is just hilarious. I wonder how that mistake happened…
    >_>
    <_<

  28. DTV Help Center on April 21st, 2009 at 6:56 pm

    Hello everyone! my name is Tyler. if you have a problem with Closed Captioning contract us. We will help you fixing Closed Captioning. Thank you.

  29. Brittany on June 11th, 2009 at 10:33 pm

    LOL this reminds me of the time that I was in NYC with my mom, sister, 2 aunts and cousin for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. There was a huge screen showing what the news cameras were capturing and it was Harry Connick, Jr. singing “My Favorite Things.” There was closed captioning on the screen and the verse was supposed to be “rain drops on roses” but instead they typed “rape drops on roses.” We could not stop laughing about that! I love mistakes in CC.

  30. Nokore on July 24th, 2009 at 11:55 pm

    SOMEBODY was given a rough time at the Closed-Captioning Station for this…

  31. LKM on August 9th, 2009 at 3:40 pm

    This is why firefighters are so damn amazing….what a job!!

  32. Anonymous on November 9th, 2009 at 6:57 pm

    Oh my…

  33. i on November 11th, 2009 at 6:29 pm

    …epic fail…I think…

  34. Anonymous on December 25th, 2009 at 11:03 pm

    Whay wud ppl be jacking off in the middle of the road???

  35. Verbatym on July 28th, 2010 at 10:00 pm

    Actually, it is mostly court reporters/stenographers who are doing the captioning :-)

  36. B. DeGeorge on August 10th, 2010 at 6:24 am

    Not long ago in a news report about Fidel Castro he was called “the Cuban dick tater.
    Just yesterday on Fox News Hillary Clinton was said to be “the second scary of state.” Freudian slip?

  37. Anonymous on October 18th, 2010 at 8:19 am

    all i read was i was hard, then i burst out laughing in the middle of english class.@Daver

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  41. Vee on June 14th, 2011 at 6:15 pm

    I keep my tv on closed captioning all the time and have witnessed several inappropriate captions…just recently on Si TV, I was watching old episodes of “Living Color” and the captions were writing a bunch of slave talk, writing stuff like yes sah boss and the like. Totally not matching the script, it went on like this for a few minutes then abruptly ended and went back to normal dialogue. Apparently no one is paying attention.

  42. Daniel on September 4th, 2011 at 10:01 pm

    Watching a few shows on ABC, their captions are atrocious. All the “won’t/want”, “would’ve/would have”, “we’ll/will” illiteracy you would expect from a school kid. And these are post-produced shows, not transcribed live. You would think a multi-million dollar production has a few bucks left to hire someone with basic knowledge of the English language.

    And FAIL to the Michael guy wise-cracking about the captioning process—and getting it wrong =)

    • Daniel on September 4th, 2011 at 10:03 pm

      FAIL myself, that should of course have been “would’ve/would of”.

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