“choose crime huts of supplements”

The chapter in the textbook was about the media, and one activity was a reading about two famous tv interviews, David Frost’s of Richard Nixon and Martin Bashir’s of Princess Diana. I found videos of both on Youtube and played them to the students. The one I found of Princess Diana is bizarre, for reasons unconnected with her. It is subtitled in Japanese, and the autosubtitling in English is way off the mark. (I can make no comment about the quality of the Japanese.) The first question on this video (which picks up in the middle of the interview) is “What effect did the depression have on your marriage?”. Her answer is autosubtitled, “Well again everybody a wonderfully new label this time as unstable and donna’s m bank in balance enforcing that seems to stop on our thirty s”.

Other excerpts are “you have so much pain inside yourself then choose crime huts of supplements” and “I want to get better analgesic enforce and continue my teaching my romance wife mother kansas last”. All within the first minute and a quarter. Ponder a while.

She actually said:

“Well, it gave everybody a wonderful new label: this Diana’s unstable, and Diana’s um mentally unbalanced, and unfortunately that seems to have stuck on and off over the years”, “You have so much pain inside yourself [seven correct words in a row] that you try and hurt yourself on the outside” and “I wanted to get better in order to go forward and continue my duty and my role as wife, mother, Princess of Wales”.

This from an interview with someone speaking standard British English in a quiet environment, albeit softly and somewhat emotionally. To be fair, I’ve never tried programming autosubtitling, so I can only guess at the the complications, but surely they can do a lot better that this. Right now, the phrase “crime huts of supplements” appears on the internet exactly zero times. In about 10 seconds, it will appear exactly once – right here.

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