DJT's name turns up in Elton's song lyrics during Disney+ concert special

[Bob Jersey]

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

[Jim Ellwanger]

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.

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[Adam Bowie]

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

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[Jim Ellwanger]

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 (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.

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[Mark Jeffries]

I didn't have the captioning on, so I never noticed it.  What I'm curious about is why Corden's buddy the producer had laugh track guy Christian Schrader sweetening the concert.  You've got 100,000 Elton John fans in Dodger Stadium making approving noise throughout the show (although staying quiet on the ballads).  It's not a comedy show, so you don't have to worry about the audience not laughing.  I don't think there was going to be any booing during the show (which Schrader covered up on the Oscars when Will Smith went up to accept his award after bitch-slapping Chris Rock--but they should've left it alone).  This show didn't need to be sweetened, as if the process of sweetening needs to be done at all, since no one-camera sitcom or cartoon uses laugh tracks anymore except as a gag.  So why?

Mark Jeffries
spotl...@gmail.com

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