Caption Writer
Job Summary
Responsible for writing captions for movies or television programs for hearing-impaired viewers or those watching TV on mute. Watches show and makes quick decisions to determine which captions will be included, edited, or left out.
Primary Responsibilities
- Write captions for TV shows or movies.
- Use stenotype equipment connected to a computer with special software to produce almost immediate captions of the words.
- Provide captions (subtitles) in English or foreign language.
- Capture, store, retrieve, and transcribe pretrial and trial proceedings or other information.
- Respond to requests during court sessions to read portions of the proceedings already recorded.
- Dictate dialogue quickly and efficiently, utilizing proper spelling and grammar.
- Record symbols on computer storage media and use computer aided transcription to translate and display them as text.
- Determine which caption phrases to revise or leave out.
- Improvise if necessary and write captions to describe music and background noises.
- Translate foreign language dialogue into English language captions.
- Translate English dialogue into foreign language captions.
- Enter commands to synchronize captions with dialogue.
- Operate computerized captioning system.
- Preside over encoding of captions to master tape of television production.
- Edit out profanities for viewing audience.
