Is it true that broadcast captioners don need to be verbatim?
False. Broadcast captioners must be as near verbatim as possible. The best truly are. However, as captioners, we are unable to “stop the speaker” and, therefore, must have the ability to edit the text as required. For instance, if the speed gets away from us for even a moment, we must find the best way to get readable text to the screen the best we know how, and that may require editing insofar as condensing the content as best we can so that the meaning is conveyed. If we encounter a word or a name that we are unsure is in our dictionary, or we are unsure of the spelling, we are then called upon to fingerspell that word or name to the best of our ability. Again, we are not able to stop the speaker, so we must be trained to deal with the situation the best that we can. In 2005, it is absolutely unacceptable for us to “substitute” words in place of words that we are unsure are in our dictionary. Word substitution was common back in the early days of captioning, late 1980s, early 1990s,
