Why do strange typos appear in the captions?
Real-time captioners, no matter how well trained or how experienced they are, will make errors. Since their caption data is transmitted instantly, there is not an opportunity to “proofread” and correct fingering or hearing errors. A good real-time captioner can work to an accuracy level of better than 99%. Captions with dropped letters usually result from broadcast transmission problems or bad television reception, not captioner error. A common problem is the dropping of a frame of video. This takes out the two characters contained in that frame, so missing letters usually are missing in pairs. These paired errors can come in the form of one letter plus one space, e.g. “on the” translates as “onhe”.
