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The JCR recently
corresponded with Dr. Fausto Ramondelli, a reporter in the
Italian Parliament and president of Intersteno. In addition to
these responsibilities, he has been involved with the effort
to provide captioning of Italian news broadcasts. Here, he
brings us up-to-date on their progress.
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How did you become involved in CART and then the captioning
project?
I started my activity in the Italian Senate in 1982 as a
parliamentary shorthand reporter. In the late '80s and early '90s, I
took part in international contests and developed some corrections
to my technique in order to achieve higher speed with a satisfactory
level of accuracy. That experience has led me to write a method
manual and to teach in several educational programs. I was appointed
a member of the Italian Shorthand Academy, where I started studying
the possibility of using the shorthand machine as a device for
subtitling. In this phase the friendship with American colleagues
and the information gleaned through reading your magazine have been
very useful.
As you know, in Italy there were not many skilled reporters in
the 1980s except in the parliaments. Only in 1989 did we have
reporting introduced in the tribunal as a consequence of the penal
code reform. Reporters have grown in number and in ability to write
accurately along with the dissemination of machine shorthand
reporting in the country. In the early 1990s, the system (machine
and human resources) was ready to meet the challenge of captioning,
but only in recent years have the accuracy and the average speed
grown to the necessary level.
Providing CART has been promoted at conventions held by
associations of the deaf community (namely FIADDA, an association of
parents of deaf children). The first performances (by Prof. Marcelo
Melani, who imports the Stenograph machine into Italy, and me) were
impressive and demonstrated that it was possible to reach the goal;
on that basis, the system has been bettered, and we have achieved
excellent results.
Two years ago, the deaf community held a protest march near the
RAI (Italian broadcast) buildings, asking for the evening news to be
subtitled. It was correctly sustained that that was their right,
since the local laws (national and European) already required the
authorities to take all steps to make television communication
accessible to hearing-impaired individuals. Due to financial
obstacles and a misconception of the problem, up to that moment
there were only offline captions (movies, serials); no captions were
provided for news or entertainment programs.
As a result of the protest, RAI promised that as of January 1,
2000, the evening news would be subtitled. They did not even know
how to accomplish this (although many attempts were done in previous
years to solicit RAI to provide that service). They asked to set up
in a few days a group of people and machines for providing the
service, which started experimentally December 23, 1999. As an
expert of this activity, I have been asked to give advice on skill
improvement and the personnel selection (five captioners), and to
check the quality of the work, in the attempt to provide the best
service that is possible within our situation. In Italy, we can
count approximately 200 reporters as the maximum; they all come from
public courses that lasted only a few hundred hours (generally 500
hours). They can reach very slow speeds of 120 words per minute,
while the talking speed is an average of 150 words per minute. Only
a few of them can reach higher speeds. You can probably imagine that
our attempt is strictly linked to those few people who can do this.
Are the people who are trying to caption the same ones who are
trying to provide the equivalent of CART reporting?
The demand is not yet great in Italy, although I feel it is about
to grow. So far, the people who provide the news captions are
employed for providing CART in rare conventions. Our program aims to
improve the skill of people already working at RAI and also recruit
new people who want the challenge of this activity. We are also
working to inform broadcasting companies, universities and other
operators about the possibilities offered by realtime captioning. I
presume that a lot of demand is still hidden behind the lack of
awareness of the power of captioning.
Most of the work is still done offline. Three reporters are
available in a room together with two to three journalists and
typists. A couple of hours before the news is broadcast, the
journalists gather video or papers with the contents of the news and
pass them to the shorthand reporters, who quickly provide the text
file. The file is passed to the typists, who enter it in the
storyboard and divide it in three-line blocks. The text blocks are
ready to be transmitted when the images and the audio are broadcast.
One of the journalists remains in the area where the news is
prepared, collecting all the materials as soon as possible and
calling the room as he or she has something to dictate to the
reporters. Should the content not be available for any reason before
the broadcast, one journalist listens to the news and simultaneously
dictates a summary to the reporter, who writes "directly to the
screen."
This very complicated system is due to many factors. First,
journalists protect their role and do not allow it to be performed
by unauthorized people such as the reporters. Second, the shortage
of very skilled reporters has rendered impossible a preferred
selection of reporters based also on their cultural skill;
therefore, it is not possible to leave to them the responsibility of
editing the captions. There is a dispute between those who think
that deaf people cannot follow the whole transcription, what would
be too fast for them, and others (I agree with this) who say that
deaf people sharpen their capability of reading very quickly and
should have the right to choose which part to exclude from their own
attention. (Feedback from the deaf community has not been completely
clear on this issue.) Although in a limited extension, some parts
are therefore eliminated, and the journalists deem that they alone
have the knowledge to decide which parts can be abbreviated.
I can say this is a good beginning, but only a beginning. As the
service will become increasingly requested and provided, many
elements can be modified and improved.
From your description, the reaction from the deaf community to
CART and captioning has been positive.
The deaf community in Italy (as everywhere, I suppose) is very
complex and composite. There are very big associations whose aims
seem to be only to provide deaf people with a monetary assistance
check every month. They are not interested in a cultural
improvement. They love to stay all together, have tours, sponsor
their own events, and so on. The sign language groups have a very
big lobby; they refused alternative ways of accessibility because
they are convinced that theirs is the best way for deaf people to
understand and communicate (and also, I would say, because there are
many sign translators who desire to improve their earnings). The
most sensitive associations are those comprised of parents of deaf
children and others who believe in the integration of deaf people
into the hearing community for reasons including encouraging
improvement of their speaking capabilities.
We have had many contacts with universities. The cultural level
of the deaf community is improving, and young people have reached
the university and have asked for CART in the schools.
All in all, the response of the deaf community to the evening
news captioning has been positive. I am expecting new pressures
toward increasing the number of transmissions to be captioned.
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