I wasn't watching (and can't tell from the screenshots), but based on the 
review of the first show in the run that I read in Saturday's L.A. Times, it's 
extremely likely that Elton John was not sticking to the exact song lyrics as 
available on genius.com <http://genius.com/> (or wherever), necessitating the 
captioner doing the captions live rather than just sending out a file of the 
lyrics at that exact moment.

Disney may well have put the fear of God into the captioning company, telling 
them that if the official lyrics say "and he shall be Levon" and Elton John 
sings "he shall be Levon," they better not see that "and" in the captions.

Based on my concertgoing experiences, I can't imagine that anything Elton John 
said between songs was scripted enough that they could have provided the text 
to the captioning company in advance.


> On Nov 21, 2022, at 4:37 PM, Adam Bowie <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> I suspect that using a stenographer is exactly what they did. But I've got to 
> question why.
> 
> The entire concert's setlist will have been known up front, so they could 
> have pre-loaded all the lyrics to all the songs in advance. 
> 
> Then the captioner just needs to do the equivalent of "copy and paste" as the 
> songs progress. In fact, a good system just probably needs a press of the 
> space bar or something to "paste" in the next line. Indeed, I've seen this 
> happen on multiple occasions in the past. E.g. The Eurovision song contest. 
> 
> You might still need to live caption anything spontaneous, but even most of 
> the between-song dialogue is likely to follow a formula and be heavily 
> scripted.
> 
> I could understand the mistakes for something largely unscripted like a chat 
> show, but a heavily produced concert makes no sense.
> 
> 
> Adam
> 
> On Tue, Nov 22, 2022 at 12:07 AM Jim Ellwanger <[email protected] 
> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>> Since I used to be involved with this kind of stuff, many years ago...
>> 
>> For a high-profile live event like this, they almost certainly had the 
>> captioning done by a stenocaptioner, who was using a court reporter's 
>> machine with its special keyboard. They're going syllable by syllable, 
>> phoneme by phoneme, pressing several keys at once to create stenographic 
>> text -- it looks like gobbledygook to the naked eye, but they've previously 
>> programmed a computer to translate the raw output into actual English.
>> 
>> When it's a phrase that might come up repeatedly, they can also create a 
>> short form of that phrase - for example, instead of doing the keystrokes for 
>> "DON-ALD-[space]-TRUMP" every time, they might program their computer so 
>> that they can just keystroke "DT" and have it come out as "DONALD TRUMP."
>> 
>> Therefore, when a stenocaptioner makes a typo (presses one wrong key), it 
>> usually doesn't just come out as one letter being incorrect, it comes out as 
>> a few letters of gibberish... or a completely wrong word or phrase, which 
>> appears to be what happened here.
>> 
>> Incidentally, the best stenocaptioners have a 99.8% accuracy rate, which 
>> basically means they're incorrect on 2 words out of every 1,000 -- but since 
>> people speak about 150 words per minute, even the best stenocaptioner will 
>> have an error every 3 or 4 minutes.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> On Nov 21, 2022, at 3:18 PM, 'Bob Jersey' via TVorNotTV 
>>> <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Might be the most bizarre autocorrect story I've ever read. The errors were 
>>> corrected for nonlive streams.
>>> https://deadline.com/2022/11/disney-removes-donald-trump-references-elton-john-concert-technical-error-1235179462/
>>>  (link)
>>> B
>>> 
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