more on live captions?

[shawna-slh]

What else might we want to say about live captions?

In the Live Captions section or throughout this page or other pages of this resource?

[shawna-slh]

previous discussion has some things we considered previously

[iadawn]

The challenge is that CART seems to be a US term. The live captions section has this:

Live captions are usually done by professional real-time captioners (also called Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) providers)

Which would be more correctly presented as:

Live captions are usually done by professional real-time captioners (sometimes called Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) providers)

(bold added to highlight change only).

I think it is really anywhere that CART is used as that may not be a common term.

[eoncins]

I agree that CART is a US term. The term "live captions" is also called "live subtitles" in most European countries and mainly used in TV working contexts when using respeaking as the captioning/subtitling technique. Are we referring to any specific context? Because every term seems to limit the profession to a technique, a context and/or a country. In the context of our project LTA (Live Text Access) we use the term "real-time intralingual subtitling" but I again see the problem of the "captioning" and "subtitling" issue. Another option is to solve this issue in the translation process which will then match the term to a specific country/context.

[bruce-usab]

I do not have specific editorial suggestions at this point. I am just reflecting on a couple things.

• I agree that CART is the term of art used by audiences that expect live captioning at live in-person events.
• For these audiences, CART has been the baseline expectation for 20+ years. Maybe 30+ years?
• My perception is that these audiences is U.S. Federal government and some (larger?) universities.
• Even with live captioning being available (again, U.S. only) at least some of time on live TV broadcasts for 30+ years, the term CART never was something which caught on with consumers of live broadcast captioning.
• I think it fair to say that the central feature of CART is the live trained human being who is providing the service.
• CART is almost always of significantly better quality than automated computer generated live transcription.
• I think the invocation of CART nowadays has come to mean something like live-captioning-that-is-of-good-quality.

Putting this all together, I think the EO article should mention CART as specific kind of live captioning. But I think just making the distinction between live and pre-recorded might be better.

@eoncins do European countries have a short-hand way to reference live captioning that is done well (sometimes) by humans -- as opposed to the (currently) mediocre job done by computer?