open captioning of the spoken language of the program

[hyldemoer]

Years ago I used to get a French channel on my cable TV subscription. It was a channel from France and the whole channel (every program on it) was open captioned in French.
At first I thought "cool! That must be for the French who are Deaf or hard of hearing" but then I asked a friend who lived in France for a while about it.
She said it wasn't uncommon to see done because a lot of French people don't understand each other's French dialects.

I rarely see American programs spoken in English open captioned in American English.
Captioning is usually something I have to request my TV to access ("closed captioned").

This afternoon we've been watching a marathon of a program, "Life on Mars", on the BBC channel.
At the beginning of each episode of the program there's a written and verbal commentary that not everybody in Britain understands each other so the parts they thought might not be understood easily are open captioned.

Two people might be chatting and an occasional few sentences here and there are open captioned.
(Until I saw the commentary at the beginning of the program I thought my TV was set to show the closed captioning and was shorting out when I didn't see the captions popping up).

Was that program intermittently open captioned in Britain too, or was this done just when showing it on the BBC in America channel?

Is it normal in places other than the USA for the language spoken in TV programs to be also open captioned in those languages?

I'm not asking about one language interpreted into another language
and there doesn't seen to be interpretations of the spoken words either. Its a literal captioning.

[Walden]

It's not uncommon on American news and documentary programs to see captioning of English spoken by people with thick accents.

[CHasR]

I love to see americans being interviewed by, say, chinese TV, and having it closed captioned "en anglais" whilst the voice over is in mandarin 'chinglish' I believe its called

[djm]

We see it here when the tv network deems a local accent too thick for general consumption.

djm

[mutepointe]

Our local TV station open captioned some people who were born and raised locally. When even the locals don't understand the locals, help is needed.

[s1m0n]

In the first Mad Max films the thick strine dialogue was captioned for North American release.

[MTGuru]

Interesting. It's certainly more common in Europe and elsewhere for regional dialect differences to be much more distinct than the relatively mild regional differences, mostly accent and minor vocabulary variants, we usually encounter in the US. That's not counting a few strong dialects such as Gullah or Cajun or even some varieties of black English.

From memory of watching TV in the UK, France and Germany, I don't recall seeing open captioning as a matter of course on national programming. But local interviews in, for example, Scots or Provençal or Bavarian might surely need captioning for a national audience. In Barcelona, programs are cross-captioned in Spanish and Catalán, but those are officially considered different languages.

A few examples of open film captioning that come to mind are the opening minutes of "The Harder They Come" (Jamaican English). And the jive sequences in Airplane.

I wish there were open captioning for the teenagers who work at the local Blockbuster and other stores. They all seem to speak a variety of mush-mouth dialect.

[s1m0n]

Interesting. It's certainly more common in Europe and elsewhere for regional dialect differences to be much more distinct than the relatively mild regional differences, mostly accent and minor vocabulary variants, we usually encounter in the US.

Like speciation, variation in dialects is a fundction of isolation + time.

Most of North America hasn't been around long enough to have diverged much. Canada is a great example. Like the US, we were mainly colonised from east to west. The oldest european settlements are in the maritimes 500 years), then quebec (400+), and then Ontario (150+) & the entire swath to the pacific was settled in a rush over about a century. In concequence, while eastern canada from the Ottawa valley to the atlantic has a large number of accents, the rest of Canada--everything west of the Ottawa valley--has essentially the same accent. There are differences, but they're very very subtle.

No place in Europe is like that.

[Lambchop]

A few examples of open I wish there were open captioning for the teenagers who work at the local Blockbuster and other stores. They all seem to speak a variety of mush-mouth dialect.

That guy at work -- the one I posted about last week -- does that. It's incomprehensible to me. (Well, to most everyone.) It's like he's speaking in some kind of hideous text message.

"BLITBLITBLIT!" "Excuse me, would you repeat that?"
"BLIT BLIT BLIT!" "I'm sorry, I still don't understand. Perhaps you could say it more slowly?"
"BLIIIT BLIIIIT BLIIIIT!" "I feel badly about this, but I still don't understand."
"BLUE PIZZA TURKEY DOG!" "Oh, OK. Gosh, I think you said blue pizza turkey dog?" [Nods yes.] "I have no idea what that is. I'm sorry. Oh, here's your boss. Maybe she can help."

And then he says, perfectly clearly, "Do you need a laptop for tomorrow?"

[Innocent Bystander]

Hi Hyldemoer!

I just bought my wife the DVDs of series two of Life on Mars. One of the reasons she likes it is because the people have Manchester accents, which is where she comes from.

No, it doesn't have open captioning in the UK. I sometimes watch programmes with the subtitles for the deaf, because something noisy is going on, or the children are doing homework. In the UK it's teletext 888, or Ceefax 888.

Now that I think of it, we often turn on the subtitles for American programmes - my Wife hates subtitles - because the idiom is foreign. We hear the words, but they don't make sense. Sometimes there is an idiomatic expression that I know, that is entirely new to my wife.

West Wing was one that we had to caption a lot.

We don't often have open captioning on programmes or news items. From time to time Scottish dialogue is open captioned, as the English cannot be trusted to understand Scots speaking English. It's a hot topic, as you can imagine, and there's ill-feeling on both sides.

[Daniel_Bingamon]

.......
"BLITBLITBLIT!" "Excuse me, would you repeat that?"
"BLIT BLIT BLIT!" "I'm sorry, I still don't understand. Perhaps you could say it more slowly?"
"BLIIIT BLIIIIT BLIIIIT!" "I feel badly about this, but I still don't understand."
"BLUE PIZZA TURKEY DOG!" "Oh, OK. Gosh, I think you said blue pizza turkey dog?" [Nods yes.] "I have no idea what that is. I'm sorry. Oh, here's your boss. Maybe she can help."

And then he says, perfectly clearly, "Do you need a laptop for tomorrow?"

That sounds like one of those phone help desk that claim that they're in Montana but wind up being somewhere in India.

[Lambchop]

.......
"BLITBLITBLIT!" "Excuse me, would you repeat that?"
"BLIT BLIT BLIT!" "I'm sorry, I still don't understand. Perhaps you could say it more slowly?"
"BLIIIT BLIIIIT BLIIIIT!" "I feel badly about this, but I still don't understand."
"BLUE PIZZA TURKEY DOG!" "Oh, OK. Gosh, I think you said blue pizza turkey dog?" [Nods yes.] "I have no idea what that is. I'm sorry. Oh, here's your boss. Maybe she can help."

And then he says, perfectly clearly, "Do you need a laptop for tomorrow?"

That sounds like one of those phone help desk that claim that they're in Montana but wind up being somewhere in India.

Oh, your analogy is much closer than you think! Muuuuuch closer.

[Tikva]

"BLITBLITBLIT!" "Excuse me, would you repeat that?"
"BLIT BLIT BLIT!" "I'm sorry, I still don't understand. Perhaps you could say it more slowly?"
"BLIIIT BLIIIIT BLIIIIT!" "I feel badly about this, but I still don't understand."
"BLUE PIZZA TURKEY DOG!" "Oh, OK. Gosh, I think you said blue pizza turkey dog?" [Nods yes.] "I have no idea what that is. I'm sorry. Oh, here's your boss. Maybe she can help."

And then he says, perfectly clearly, "Do you need a laptop for tomorrow?"

This reminds me sooooo much of my boyfriend when visiting my parent's place. He'd understand your problem perfectly.

When I grew up, my parents taught me how to speak standard German perfectly, in fact I did not know anything about the local dialect until I went to preschool. The locals will know that about five seconds into a sentence; strangers will never find out.

The funny thing about learning the dialect was that I somehow chose to forego words sounding too harsh to my own ears. I understand them perfectly, but simply replace them by standard words.

Most people in this region are not able to switch between idiom and standard, so any time there's an interview on TV that is broadcast outside the federal state, there is open caption.
And honestly, it's necessary, these people sound like they're coming from Mars.

Funnily enough knowing this local dialect, French and a bit Italian, you have no problem to get Swiss German as well as any German dialect you might come across. Minus some local specialties, of course.

To all Swiss people who might be reading this, I know I have not made this quite clear:
I am well aware that Swiss German is NOT a German dialect!