What causes mistakes in captioning?
A. Captioning quality can vary among the many captioning companies. Errors may occur because of technical problems in the transmission and receipt of the captions, or possibly due to human error. Real-time (live) captions are displayed instantly. The captioner cannot proofread or correct them when an error occurs. Prior to a real-time broadcast, the captioner performs research on the broadcast topics and updates the computer dictionary with words that could possibly be spoken during the respective program. This includes but is not limited to names, places, and foreign words. If a captioner does not have a specific word in the computer dictionary, the computer may not recognize the syllables as a word, and might display the individual syllables as separate words. Captioners must also program their captioning dictionary to make the computer distinguish among words that sound the same but are spelled differently (homonyms), such as “Ben” and “been”, and “pear”, “pare”, and “pair”. Mistake
