I was re-reading the thread on the 50-book challenge. In one of her posts, Labrat said:
there's this weird thing they keep doing when Sookie reads minds, a vocal distortion, which, coupled with an already hard-for-the-Scottish-ear-to-decipher Louisiana accent, made those portions of the dialogue almost impossible to make out. I had to go searching for transcripts online to find out what had been said.
I was wondering if any of you from the UK or Europe ever use closed captioning to understand American accents? BBC America actually includes instructions for us in how to use it to understand British accents, and I now use it all the time. I have a 30 to 35-db midrange hearing loss, so I used to be constantly asking other people to repeat dialogue for me, but now I can just read it on the screen. I also occasionally turn on the captioning and watch the Spanish-language stations, when I am trying to learn Spanish (the unofficial second language of the American south). Those captions are in Spanish, but seeing it on the screen makes it easier to understand.
Captioning doesn't work well on live broadcasts like news feeds--sometimes the results are quite funny--but it's interesting on scripted shows, because the words on the screen are often those in the script, not always what the actors actually say, and sometimes you get bits of dialogue that don't actually make it onscreen.
I checked my LnC DVDs; captioning is available for the actual shows, but not the "bonus" materials. Does anyone know how well the LnC captioning corresponds to the transcripts of the shows?
