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Closed Captioning - what happened?
Hello fellow Mythical Beasts,
I hope it's alright to make this topic.
I'm deaf and I'm from Europe. I've been enjoying GMM for over a year since I discovered that they're captioning their videos. But now since June I can't really enjoy their videos anymore because... the videos aren't being captioned anymore.
I did some research and found vague rumors on Twitter that the captioning team has apparently quit although I read some people wanted to apply for captioning but didn't get accepted. I think that's very sad, especially for those with hearing disabilites as well for those whose native language isn't English.
For now I can only enjoy the old videos which are already captioned but it makes me really sad not being able to watch the new content anymore.
I wished Rhett and Link and their production team were aware of this problem.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Martin B ^-^(the komm father) on -
I remember when people were volunteering to caption in different languages a while a go. It is indeed very important to have the videos captioned for the reasons you have mentioned. I find it strange for a channel as big as Good Mythical Morning to suddenly not have captions anymore.
I hope this discussion will get more attention, so that more people are aware. Perhaps we, the kommunity, can get the captions back! :)
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K-ModPermalink Reply by Gumbo123 on -
Hi, Liz - - I'm not certain what the current status is, especially in any languages other than English, since it's not a feature that I personally use.
Just going to point you to a few Kommunity members who are, or at least were at some point, on the captioning team. Hopefully they can give us all an update.
I did find the Youtube Group for those who are (or were) on the actual GMM Caption team. It lists Becca Canote as the group "owner", and I know for a fact that Becca is no longer a Mythical Entertainment employee. Not sure who is running it now, but the dashboard does contain a link to contact a team admin.
Also, here is the original blog post from Jen Matichuk with discussions from when the captioning team was put together just over two years ago . . . Caption GMM Episodes in Different Languages!
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K-ModPermalink Reply by Gumbo123 on -
Also, I played around with it a bit today and see that Youtube's "auto caption" function now also includes an option to auto translate from English to numerous languages. Have you tried out that feature yet? Just curious if it helps at all, or if it gets so jumbled that the robotic translator is totally useless.
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Permalink Reply by Alicia on
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I can understand written English fine enough so I wouldn't have to depend on captions in my native language. I've now tried the translate thing but I can confirm it is pretty useless. Definitely not fun.
I know autocaptioning (at least in English) is better than it used to be but sometimes you still miss things. It just doesn't feel right and I can never be 100% sure about what has been said.
I'd be glad to hear any update from the captioning team. Thanks for pointing them out.
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Permalink Reply by MothTurtle on
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I agree autocaptioning is severely lacking. I'd be happy to caption (my husband is partially deaf and I obviously sympathise) but my typing is slowish so it takes like 30 minish to caption a 10 minish video. Not ideal but better than nothing, I guess.
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A few months ago, H3H3Productions opened up captioning completely and it actually worked pretty well, as far as I'm aware. I even did a few episodes. I suppose the problem is you've got to trust your audience to be mature enough not to mess around and to moderate themselves.
The autocaptioning is getting better but it can't deal with deviations from non-standard English.
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K-ModPermalink Reply by Kevin (UniSeal) on -
Hi, Alicia. I've been on the caption team since it started, and I'll give you a summary of what's happened and why there aren't captions anymore.
In September of 2014, crew member Jen posted here on the Kommunity looking for volunteers to caption videos. Several of us joined the team, and a few members who had done captioning before helped the inexperienced members get up to speed. By October 2014, we were ready to officially begin captioning and devised a schedule assigning certain team members to certain days. I've been adding captions to every Tuesday episode since then.
Over the next several months, the caption team used amara.org to transcribe GMM episodes. Initially we were required to email Jen with the completed captions and she would associate them with the YouTube video. Given that we had to wait for her to get around to checking the email, captions could take up to a few weeks to be posted. Since most caption team members were putting in the time and effort to finish the captions as soon as possible after the episode was released, many members got frustrated that their captions weren't being added in a timely manner.
After raising this complaint with the GMM crew on a few occasions, they set up an official Amara team, which would allow us captioners to directly submit the captions for a give video. Once submitted, Jen could then approve them through Amara and they would appear on the YouTube video. For a while, this allowed the captions to be publicly visible sooner, but eventually it fell back to captions being neglected for long stretches of time after their completion.
Because of this, many caption team members grew disillusioned with captioning because they felt their work was not helping the people who needed the captions soon after its release. Members also felt underappreciated, since whenever we tried to contact the GMM crew with questions or critiques, we did not receive timely responses. When we did eventually get responses, they occasionally were borderline rude and further alienated caption team members.
Jen eventually transitioned out of the caption-supervision role and Becca took over. I found Becca to be much more involved and timely in getting captions approved, but the caption team was already very small by that time. Most members had given up.
A few months ago, when Becca left Mythical Entertainment, we were informed that a new crew member, Kate, would be supervising the captions. I talked with her once, and she seemed motivated enough, but she left Mythical Entertainment a few weeks ago. We never got word of who would be taking over the captions, and no captions have been approved since then.
As far as I can tell, I am the only one who has added any captions while season 10 has been airing. I've captioned every Tuesday episode since October 2014, but the last month of those haven't been published yet. We haven't gotten any communication from the crew about a new caption supervisor, and the volunteer caption team has effectively dwindled down to nothing.
Sorry to inform you of this, but that's the state of affairs. There won't be any more captions until Mythical Entertainment decides to start managing the captioning effort again, and we have no idea when that will be.
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Permalink Reply by Grave on
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That's disheartening, I really admired to effort to make GMM more accessible. I've actually had quite a few people ask about the captioning delay, some of them saying that they now semi-rely on my captioned gifs to "watch" the episodes, which obviously isn't ideal. At all.
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Permalink Reply by Grace (Pheasphant) on
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That's such a shame
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Thank you for clearing this up. It's really a terrible pity but at least we know how things are. I hope we don't have to keep waiting for a very long time...
Kevin, I want to say I really appreciate your captioning work. Thank you so much for doing it, it has always made me happy to be able to enjoy GMM just like everyone else. :)
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K-ModPermalink Reply by Kevin (UniSeal) on -
You are welcome!
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Permalink Reply by Link_McAllanFX (Seaghánaggarty) on
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This is something I'd really like to come back. I have hearing difficulties myself, and at the moment I can use hearing aids, but, in my future, I know that things are only going to get worse and I'll one day rely on captioning. Because of this, I actually do occasional captioning work, because it's something that is important to me. And it's important to me because I want this to become more of a normal thing, so I'm less likely to be in the situation that Alicia is in here. It's more or less a standard across all platforms, but YouTube is definitely behind here and it makes sense - because more people pay to get their captioning done and that's not something YouTubers are in as much of a position to do.
And there's definitely a time issue with regards to GMM. Most people are watching within the first 24 hours, and definitely after a week, it does become an issue of whether it's truly worth it.
It's sad to think that mythical beasts are missing out.
I think this would be something to keep chasing up, Kevin. And your contributions are obviously appreciated, and a thousand pats on the back for that.
And if we have lost people for captioning if this ever does get rectified, I'd throw my experienced hat in the ring.
I know that if the captions are done directly on YouTube that there is a review system in place there where it either requires owner review, or other members reviewing and approving until there's enough approvals. But then I don't think it's possible to restrict who can do the captioning on YouTube to avoid pranksters - I haven't looked into that.
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