what I've been transcribing this week (instead of due South)

[fox]

As I mentioned, I spent some time in the past few days subtitling the audio from the Zoom recording of Himself's aunt's funeral on Sunday. I ended up with a transcript file, broke it out into captions, and spent a futile while trying to import those into something, anything, that would stitch the captions onto the video before I gave up and installed Creative Cloud so I could do it in PremierePro. At which point I had to allow it to do a transcription and then correct that from what I already had, so I probably could have saved a couple of hours if that's where I'd begun, but never mind.

(Friends: The text-to-speech function on PremierePro is faaairly impressive. It's also entertaining as all get-out to see what it comes up with when you've told it you're working in English and it bumps into the bits where someone is speaking Hebrew. I have never seen such word salad. Awesome.)

Anyway, once I had proper what-you're-hearing captions, I also formatted them up nicely and—this is the bit I'm happiest about—sub-subtitled the Hebrew so those unfamiliar with Jewish funerals would know what was happening. Here's a screenshot from Tziduk Hadin:

The top line, of course, is what the rabbi was saying; the middle line is the transliteration, that is, what people heard who can only read the roman alphabet; the bottom is the translation. When the whole assembly was speaking together (23rd psalm, most of Mourner's Kaddish), I underlined the transliteration:

When the whole assembly was replying (those few bits of Mourner's Kaddish that everyone says whether they're personally bereft or not), I bolded the transliteration:

It was a big job, and I'm glad I did it, especially taking the time and effort to do the Hebrew bits rather than doing what TV captioners often fall back on:

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

That's an exquisite gift to all who mourn.