Unlikely beginnings...
So how did you first get into the field of transcription? How does someone learn to do this? It seems like an incredibly unique skill set.
Well, I sort of fell into it. I was the first person in my family to go to college. Therefore, I didn’t have a lot of guidance when it came to planning my college education or my career. I remember feeling lost. But now, looking back at it, it seems like such a happy accident the way things all turned out.
Back in those days, many people didn’t have a plan when it came to college programs or careers. Now, guidance counsellors help you along the way. But back then, you went to the guidance counsellor only if you got in trouble. Which I never did. I was a good student. So nobody told me that I had to take the SATs. All my friends were getting accepted into college but no one told me to apply. No one in my family had been through that process—they didn’t know.
So in April of that year, after all of my friends had been accepted, the guidance counsellor stopped me in the hall and asked: “Hey Norma, where are you going to college?” And I didn’t have an answer.
He sounds like a helpful guy.
[Laughing.] Helpful albeit a little late. I told him I was going nowhere which upset him—I could tell. So he actually (and very quickly) found me a school which did not require the SATs. It was essentially a trade school and it was just down the road. He even applied for me since no one in my family was able to help me do it. I was graduating 11th in my class out of over 300 people but I was so far behind in many other ways. When I think about it now, sometimes I laugh and sometimes I cry. Sometimes both at the same time.
There must be a german word for that…
If there is it’s probably unpronounceable. [Laughing.] Anyway, the school ended up accepting my application very quickly and suggested that I go into the Court Reporting program. And that’s how it all began. I started the program and it seemed to be tailor-made for me in so many ways. It was perfect. I did really well. I got certified. I graduated. It turned out that transcription was my thing.
Everything was coming up Norma.
[Laughing] Yes. At the beginning of my career, I worked in court. I did that for 13 years. And then I was recruited by the BBC in London. They wanted me to shift from a court reporter to a real-time captioner. So they sent me away, I was re-trained, and then I worked for the BBC for a number of years.
But over those years, the technology changed. All of a sudden you could do real-time captioning work on-site, off-site, remotely. So I came back to America. After a while, the technology caught up and new possibilities opened up. A local university started begging me to come and to do captioning for them. They had a student that really needed this service but I had no interest whatsoever.
I eventually relented and told them I would try it for one semester. I got in there and after the first day, I realized, Yeah, this is what I want to be doing for the rest of my life. I love this so much. That was over ten years ago and I’ve been doing this ever since.
And now you also do captioning for big events and live performances.
Yes. I run my own business now. We do on-site and remote captioning and I’ve done many, many conferences and events. We actually specialize in all the stuff that most captioners don’t want to do. [Laughing.] Medical schools, technical conferences—all the hardest stuff to caption.
This is what I want to be doing for the rest of my life.
Keys and codes and chords, oh my!
Okay. So what, exactly, is a real-time captioner? How does your current role differ from someone who is in a medical or legal field?
People who are in the courts—or people who used to be in the courts, some have been replaced by machines—use the same basic technology as we do. Those of us doing real-time transcription or real-time captioning are essentially doing the same kind of stenography but on steroids. That’s what I like to say.
Stenography on steroids. That can be the title of your memoir.
[Laughing] Maybe! Basically, when you are working in court or doing depositions, it’s different from medical transcription because medical transcription is usually just listening to tapes and transcribing them on a typewriter. But both of those fields have one big thing in common: you can just fix your mistakes later.
But when you are captioning in real-time you really have to be so much more precise. In most cases, the words being said appear on a screen as you type them. You have to be able to capture everything accurately and in real-time so that the reader in the audience doesn’t have to guess what’s being said. Captioners make that understanding possible right in the moment.
You did real-time captioning at a conference that some of my Louder Than Ten colleagues were at. I asked them to describe what it looked like when you were working and they said you were pressing on, essentially, a weird little typewriter as if you were putting some secret codes into it.
It’s not exactly a typewriter. It’s a steno machine—a stenography machine. And boy, have they come a long way since I started my career!
And how are those different from a typewriter? What makes them unique?
Well, it’s a chorded keyboard. So I’m writing in chords. It’s more like playing the piano than it is like typing. I’m essentially striking an entire chord at a time (instead of going letter by letter). So normally what comes out is an entire word—or sometimes an entire phrase.
The chords are a kind of shorthand. And they are matched up with the dictionary on my computer that I have programmed essentially word by word to tell it—to explain to it—exactly how I write each specific word or syllable or phrase that might come up. So if you miss one little key in a chord, you get the whole thing wrong. Computers, unfortunately, are very literal. That’s why such precision is required. You need to get things exactly right because each mistake is displayed on a giant screen in front of hundreds of people. [Laughing.]
Norma’s stenography machine
Computers, unfortunately, are very literal.
“Mindfully incorporating you into the process”
Of the many events that you’ve worked at and captioned, are there any that stand out? What have been some of the fascinating or off-the-wall events that you’ve gotten to be a part of?
I have to say, if we’re using the term “off-the-wall,” it would have to be captioning for stand up comedians. Those events are just so hard. What you’re trying to do, more than getting the words right, is to match the timing—the delivery. But you have no idea where they’re going to go or what they’re going to talk about. It’s really tough but it’s so much fun.
It’s like getting on a roller coaster you can’t get off for an hour. But then there are these moments when you really get the timing and the emphasis perfect—it’s the most incredible feeling when you are in sync with a live performer like that. There’s this wonderful feeling of hitting it, of getting it right on the nose. And when the deaf audience is able to laugh at the appropriate moments along with everyone else, it’s just so gratifying and rewarding.
I’ve done Jon Stewart and Seth Meyers and many, many others. But the one that was the most difficult was this young, up-and-coming comedian named Bo Burnham.
I’ve seen his stuff. He does a lot of musical pieces in his sets. That must have been hard.
Yes! Oh my goodness! When I heard he was coming I went on YouTube and I watched some of his stuff and I thought, Oh man, this kid is going to kill me. [Laughing.]
So I did as much preparing beforehand as I could. I even reached out to him on Facebook. And when he arrived at the university for the show, he was walking around on campus asking everyone: “Where’s Norma? I want to talk to Norma.”
I met him in the green room and we chatted and I asked: “Can you just give me some idea of where you’re going to go?” And he said: “I can’t really tell you. I do everything in my own way. But here’s what I will tell you. Or rather, I’ll warn you: I plan on mindfully incorporating you into the process.”
That must have been either very exciting or completely terrifying.
[Laughing.] It was both. But I like to think I did really well that night—you could say I was on my game. What happened was, every so often, he would stop and go into the crowd and look at the screen where the captioned words were appearing and ask the audience: “How’s she doing?” And the crowd would cheer and he’d improvise a joke or two about captioning which I would then caption. It was hilarious.
That sounds like a lot of fun. I see how jokes might be much harder to caption—at least compared to Powerpoint presentations at a conference. But I expect comedy events can also be more forgiving and interactive and rewarding.
Oh totally. That’s one of my favourite stories to tell, in part, because it went so well. It could have been a very different story had things gone differently.
So who is the most famous person whose words you’ve captioned?
Once I captioned for President Obama when he came to our town. I was almost close enough to touch him because I was set up up front in the section for people with handicaps. It was surreal. My background had to be checked by the secret service and all of that.
And then I was sitting there, captioning the event, and it felt like someone was staring at me. So I turned and, over my shoulder, I noticed that one of the secret service guys was staring at my screen while I captioned. He seemed to be completely entranced by what I was doing. In that moment, he was watching so closely that it looked like he had totally lost track of what he was actually supposed to be doing.
You compromised the safety of the President! Norma!! [Laughing.]
[Laughing.] Only for a moment!
I forgive you. And I can totally understand how unique it must be to see someone do what you do—to watch someone interpret and translate something so quickly and in a way that many people have never experienced.
Yes. I understand how it can seem like a weird thing at first. This attention that my work is getting, the demand for these services is still fairly new in many fields.
When I was a court reporter, judges and lawyers were so very used to us being around. They didn’t pay us any mind at all and many of them took us for granted. But now, when I go to these conferences and events, people—even people who aren’t part of my expected audience, people who don’t need captioning—are always so appreciative.
In part, I think it’s because I’m doing something that is very valuable to the deaf and hard of hearing population (as well as people for whom English is a second language, people with ADHD, audio processing disorders, people who have had brain injuries, and many other things). They really benefit from this. It helps people. And it’s like you said: it’s unusual and interesting. It’s a unique thing to experience even if people don’t need it.
He totally lost track of what he was actually supposed to be doing.
Swear words, jokes, and uncomfortable murmuring
When you’re at a conference, do you ever smirk or grin or cringe when something happens on stage? I mean, people can see you and they know what you’re doing. Are you allowed to react and be a human or are you expected to be like those unflinching Royal Guards outside Buckingham Palace?
[Laughing.] For me, it definitely depends on the event. I do a lot of high profile events at universities and such where there is a lot of pomp and circumstance and everything has to be just so. I certainly wouldn’t react in any noticeable way. Or, at least I’d try not to.
So you, as a person, have to try to fit in at each event. Like a chameleon.
Exactly. Very much so. And that’s the wonderful thing about doing tech conferences and less formal events—the fact that we can really let our personalities show. The audiences love that, many audiences almost want it. When we can be a little smart or sarcastic or a little inappropriate or include clever emojis, that always goes over incredibly well. But I definitely couldn’t do that at some events.
When I was captioning news and current affairs at the BBC in London, I had to take out any word that could even remotely be mistranslated as a swear or something offensive. Whereas now, at some of these comedy events, I have to make sure I include all of the swear words. [Laughing.]
So you have to remain pretty objective it seems.
Most of the time, yes. We do.
But within a single performance, the same phrase can mean very different things depending on inflection or body language. (Like “Thanks, Norma.” versus “Thanks, Norma!”) Does that ever get lost? How do you convey those types of things? Can you?
That’s a great question! You hit that one right on the head. In court, you’re never allowed to do that. Never allowed. Black and white. But what I do now is much more about trying to convey the feeling—what people often call the flavour of the event—rather than the exact record. My deaf audiences, the deaf attendees of these events, have always taught me (and continue to teach me) that fact. They want to understand the feel of the event. They want to know if someone is stuttering. They want to know the lilt and inflection, the way you can tell a sentence is a question by the emphasis on certain words.
And I’m still working on that. I’m still trying to be a better conveyor of what is actually happening—everything that is actually happening—like including (sighs exasperatedly) in parentheses for example.
[Laughing.] Is there shorthand for ‘uncomfortable murmuring in the crowd’?
[Laughing.] I don’t think so. But that’s exactly the type of thing I’m talking about. One thing I’ve been saying a lot lately is (stage whisper) in parentheses. For some reason it just keeps coming up at events I caption and it’s an example of people, the presenters, doing something for effect that I have to convey as best I can. You can tell that the audiences appreciate that sort of thing but it’s something I have to keep practicing. My court stenographer training was so very opposed to that way of doing things so it’s something I’m still working on—something I’m trying to get better at.
And this part of your work will probably keep evolving as well—conveying the way people talk and present at these events. Body language and jargon and inside jokes are always changing and you have to constantly invent ways to convey all that stuff.
Yes, exactly. You have to be really quick. I often watch other captioners and see how they do these types of things. Sometimes I get envious of their abilities but I also try to learn from them.
Like a musician would learn from another musician.
Totally. Even something like dialect—being able to convey the difference between ‘everybody’ and ‘eeeeeeverybody’ can make a huge difference to the audience. The goal is to really, truly convey what’s happening rather than just the words that are being said.
I have to make sure I include all of the swear words.
Processing information and predicting the future...
Are you able to process the information you hear as you’re captioning? Or does the immediacy of the captioning process prevent you from internalizing and understanding the content?
For the most part, I’d say the latter is true. Especially if things are going really, really fast. We just have to concentrate on getting out the words. So if someone—and this happens in court all the time—asks: ‘What was that he just said?’ I usually go ‘Uh, I don’t know’ and have to check the notes even though it was just three minutes earlier.
One of the specialties we focus on at my company is medical school. And I’ve helped seven different students through medical school. I was there with them the whole time so, in a weird way, it’s like I’ve been through medical school many times. People have joked: “Hey, you should take the medical board!”
I don’t think I could do that. No way. But after all this time I can sometimes predict what the professor is going to say next. Even though it is always different professors and different classes at different schools, because I have heard it all so many times, there’s something about anticipating another person’s thought process that I have become quite good at. I can’t tell you what the professor just said, but I can probably tell you what he’ll say next.
You must use the intuitive, anticipating part of the brain that improvisers or jazz musicians might use more than the rote memory or data recollection parts of the brain.
Yeah, very much so. Whereas the recollection and long-term memory parts of my brain are probably… well…
Don’t worry about it! We don’t need that part. Memories are overrated!
[Laughing.] Yeah. Let’s keep telling ourselves that!
Who needs memories when you get to wake up in the middle of the night quoting random parts of a conference presentation to yourself?
[Laughing.] The other interesting thing is that, if I were to re-read the words of the event I actually hear it as if it were an audio recording—as if I was there, in person, listening to it once again. It’s the same for court recordings. If you asked me what the closing arguments were, I’d have this dumbfounded look on my face. But if I re-read the transcripts, it would be like listening to the lawyers in the courtroom. It’s very bizarre.
I’ve helped seven different students through medical school.
The robots are coming. Or are they?
From what little I understand, it still seems somewhat difficult for machines to be able to learn the nuances and intricacies and patterns of human speech. Do you worry about machines taking over transcription and captioning? Is this a concern for people in your industry?
It’s not really a concern for us yet. My entire career has been 37 years long and when I started, they said: “You’re gonna be replaced by technology.”
And some of us were—mainly court transcriptionists. But then they realized that the machines didn’t work that great and re-hired everyone. They learned that running tape recorders or digital recorders in court didn’t really do the job. We actually lost a generation of people that could have been trained in this work because they thought it was a dead-end career, but it turns out that it wasn’t.
We’ve always had this warning looming over us—this threat that keeps lingering on the horizon. But it still seems far away.
To be fair, machines have taken over a lot of jobs in other fields. But there are also many people that are unable or unwilling to realize that just because technology can do something, that doesn’t mean technology can do it well.
Right. Exactly. We have had some clients that say: “Well, good enough is good enough.” And they go with the cheap, digital transcribing program until they realize it’s riddled with errors. But there have always been those that value our work, that recognize the importance of accurate, top-quality transcribing and captioning.
There was a moment at a conference in St. Louis recently, the speaker was absolutely brilliant and at the top of her mathematical field and she had a heavy Chinese accent. And over the course of the talk, I noticed many, many people moving to my side of the room and it was this huge eye-opening moment for all of them. They said things like: “I’m not hard of hearing but I needed this service and it was incredibly valuable to have it available.”
I’m sure there are tons of unexpected situations where the value of this service becomes clear for those who otherwise wouldn’t think they need it.
I think that clients who care about their image will always do what’s best for their audience. But there will also be clients who need or want to go for a less expensive option. Maybe someday those computers will actually replace me, but at the moment technology can’t quite process language in the way that the human brain does.
Perhaps because the rules of language are constantly changing. There are constantly new words, phrasing, inflection, syntax, symbols...
Exactly. All of that. Doing a job or being able to do a job is one thing. But learning to keep up while that job changes and gets more complex is an entirely different thing.
We actually lost a generation of people that could have been trained in this work because they thought it was a dead-end career, but it turns out that it wasn’t.
Hypotheticals
Okay, if you weren’t a transcriptionist if we lived in an alternate universe where the robots could do this better than any human ever could, what do you think you would be doing instead?
Oh my gosh! I have so many interests. I think if I were to do it differently if things had gone differently, I think I would have been some kind of biologist. I don’t know what field or what direction but that was one of my many interests when I was younger.
So given the perspective you have had at all these live events, with your years of experience listening to people speak, share their ideas and their passions, what’s one thing you have learned or noticed about the way we communicate or share information after watching and listening to people for so many years?
Wow. That’s a good question. I’m so focused on the minutia and the details and the correct words, I’ve never really paid much attention to patterns...
That’s my hard question of the day. Do you want an easier one? [Laughing]
[Laughing.] That is a hard question! Actually, one of the things I’ve noticed over time is how many different ways of communicating there really are—like humour or sarcasm. And I have become so aware of people who don’t understand the language of humour. It’s like a dialect that people can share, and you can be on the same wavelength with another humorous or sarcastic person but someone else might be completely unable to understand what you’re actually trying to get across. I would hate to lose the ability to understand and engage with that part of our language. It would completely change so many of your everyday experiences.
I watched a movie recently where one character was from a different culture where they didn’t have, and thus couldn’t understand, idioms. Without access to those colloquial metaphors, the way he experienced his surroundings was quite different from the others.
It would be amazing, I think, to be able to convey or communicate in a meaningful way humour or sarcasm to a person who is otherwise unable to understand it.
There! You did it. You survived the hard question! I have one final thing to ask... will you transcribe this interview so I don’t have to?
[Laughing] Maybe! How long have we been talking? I could probably fit that into my schedule.
Perfect. I’m going to ask everyone I interview from now on if they will do the transcribing for me.
[Laughing] Oh no. I’ve set a terrible precedent.
You certainly have.
Norma is the president of White Coat Captioning.
You can follow her on Twitter at @whitecoatcapxg.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
