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Comment by jamesbrownuhh | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to over-state the power and value of having a text transcript of any kind of spoken material like this. It literally unlocks a world of possibilities - not just for search and video indexing, both massively useful in themselves, but also to make such talks genuinely digitally accessible, in such a way that they can be read and interpreted by people who cannot hear, or a worldwide audience of people who don't necessarily have English as a first or second language.

Caption all the things. There are so many benefits that it's just daft not to.

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My native language is not English, had to learn it myself on written material. I could read and write just fine, but no way understand spoken English. I'd sometimes start watching some tech video, or listen to a talk, try to catch a few words here and there. Captioning would be a blessing back then.

Actually it was. I discovered American TV shows on the internet (well.. had no legal way to access them) Started watching first season 24 with subtitles, they were like training wheels for ~20 eposiodes. Then I managed to ditch them and started listening (with a finger on a shortcut to jump 10 seconds back).

So, please have text transcripts if possible. They make a huge difference for non English speakers.

Oh yeah I've learned a lot of my English from TV show with subtitles. Some countries (Russia) always dub English shows and moves while others like Romania pretty much never dub and most always just write subtitles. I think that account for %-wise more Romanian young people speaking better English.

I was recently in Romania and was blown away at how casually people spoke English! A slightly American accent, with pacing and rhythm similar to a native speaker.

Contrasting that to German English speakers whom likely had high quality English classes throughout education speak with a specific accent and rhythm closer to that of the German language.

I don't know if their are technical reasons for this, but anecdotally Romanians had said they learned a lot of their English from watching dubbed TV and movies.

Someone else in this thread mentioned the show 24. It's fascinating that, indirectly, watching pirated copies of a typically Hollywood entertainment television show (which academic and intellectual communities may find "crude") can open up a wealth of knowledge and culture (English language only resources) for people whom, potentially, wouldn't have had the educational opportunities otherwise.

It makes my spine tingle when stories like this flip your understanding and perspective of things like the Hollywood Entertainment Machine. Things have value in unexpected and fascinating ways.

In China, you can buy the scripts to Friends with the Chinease translation printed below as a learning resource.

I knew a guy at university who had an ok understanding of thw english language with a fairly Chinease accent, but would occasionally say strange slang informal words that no one has said since Friends aired.

That is likely because Germany dubs all of their shows on television (and I think most of western Europe does the same). Nobody that I know of in eastern Europe dubs their shows for television, we just caption them.

Hence, people speak good English with a slightly american accent. We're exposed to it pretty much all our lives.

> It makes my spine tingle when stories like this flip your understanding and perspective of things like the Hollywood Entertainment Machine.

No doubt. Not sure if they ever made a conscious choice of "we'll teach our people English better" or they just took the easier route. But watching American shows in English is really invaluable to learning American conversational English. A huge part of it is always cultural references and sayings that just never translate directly things like "Don't put the cart before the horse" saying, of even stupid movie and pop culture memes like "Hasta la vista, baby" (Terminator 2) That is stuff one has very little chance of learning in school (grammar and vocabulary always come first).

Agree. The only question is should it be real-time or post process. There was real time transcription at DEFCON last year (my first time at that con) and while it was occasionally humorous, and occasionally confusing, it was almost always useful as a fallback when you couldn't quite hear the speaker, and also particularly during Q&A when the discussion wasn't well mic'd.

So I would say transcription is a must have and even real time transcription is a feature a large portion of attendees will benefit from, not just those who can't hear well, unless your conference space is fairly small or your sound system is truly excellent.

I guess it's also worth considering why the sound systems for these conferences are so epically bad. For example, what's with passing around microphones when we are all already carrying our own personal mic?

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