Why are captions on TV shows sometimes different from the words the actors say, but in ways that aren’t explainable by being misheard by a transcriber?

Question

For example, the actor in the movie just said “I’ve been saying that”, and the caption said “I’ve said that”. Do the transcribers have access to the screenplay, and use that as a starting point?

In: Other

Answer 1

[Tom Scott has a great video about this, and more, about dubbing versus captions.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pU9sHwNKc2c)

Basically, especially with older TV, pausing wasn’t really a thing. You had to get the meaning as a deaf or hard of hearing individual the first time through. They only have so much space on the screen that they can use for captioning, and if there’s fast speech, they need to keep up. That may be hard for people trying to read along during a quick scene. So it’s not uncommon to simplify the language to fit on the screen and fit on the screen for the amount of time that they have to display it.

Captions have become more true to the spoken word in the age of pausing.