Written in Non-English: How the Grammys captioning snafu happened and how you can avoid it

Singing in Non-English. I have spent the past week thinking about how to respond to the Bad Bunny Captions at the Grammys. To be clear - I was not involved in the Grammys production or broadcast, but as a live event accessibility consultant and live event captioning engineer, I have been trying to decide how to weigh in.

For those who missed it, the artist Bad Bunny, who is Puerto Rican, opened the 2023 Grammys with a performance in Spanish. He also won an award, and he gave his acceptance speech in mixed English and Spanish. The broadcast Closed Captions included his words in English, and when he spoke or sang in Spanish, the Captions read “Speaking (or Singing) in Non-English.” There were also a couple of other instances where song lyrics were mis-captioned or missing from the transcript (Of particular note - Busta Rhymes performance of “Look at Me Now”).

I’ve seen a lot of discussion about an “AI Failure” - so it’s important to clarify that the captions were being typed by a human. While Automatic Speech Recognition - ASR, or AI captioning, is used in lots of news and local live TV programming, by and large high profile event captions are typed by a human stenographer, using the same shorthand used by court reporters to transcribe a hearing.

Which bring us to “Non-English” - ultimately, a human captioner, who, it seems, only speaks and writes in English, heard a language they didn’t know, and did exactly what they were trained to do, which is to indicate there was audio in a language other than the language they were hired to transcribe.?

How did this come to pass? Obviously I wasn’t there, but as someone who works in live events, I can tell you there are a lot of cooks in the kitchen. This is not to excuse CBS or The Recording Academy of their responsibility to produce an accessible and culturally competent event broadcast. This was a failure of both organizations collectively to provide both.

There were multiple silos, with multiple production teams involved, and no one asked the show team to provide the caption agency with adequate preparation materials, including song lyrics for planned performances, both those in English as well as those Spanish, and it appears no one communicated to the agency there was likely to be multilingual content.

Overall, there are VERY few multilingual captioners. There is a very small pool of highly qualified live English CART captioners, and an even smaller pool of multilingual stenographers. So absent a specific client request, it’s highly unlikely that a multilingual captioner would be transcribing any given broadcast.

So overall, this failure to adequately caption Bad Bunny’s performance and speeches at the Grammys (and failure to caption Busta Rhyme’s performance) was caused by production silos and lack of communication between teams and vendors. Which is super common, and inevitably leads to oversights that affect the parts of the production that have the least institutional advocacy. Like Accessibility.

My work in this space, which I usually call “Accessibility Engineering” but could be rightly called “Accessibility Producing” - which involves designing technical systems for accessibility - is as much about opening channels of communication between the production team, the AV team, the broadcast team, and the captioning and interpretation agencies. Knowing what questions to ask, advocating with all teams for the best accessibility outcome, and the best collaboration possible. That means asking questions and standing up for the often overlooked requirement to produce an accessible event broadcast. It means advocating for and being the voice of the individual captioners and interpreters and what they need to be prepared for the event, and reconciling assumptions and documentation to make sure that everyone is on the same page on technical and production needs.

On a big show like the Grammys, there are dozens of teams, all with different assignments, and we need to be careful that we’re all speaking the same language, the language of production.

But our audience doesn’t speak production. They come to a ballroom or turn on the TV or a live stream, and when they do they expect and deserve a show that they can enjoy. Our duty as production professionals is to provide a show that the viewer can understand. Accessibility - including captions - is a huge part of that. Production is complicated. We need our clients, our production partners, and our vendors to be actively communicating about what the show looks like so that every team member is empowered to deliver the best show to our audience. We need team members explicitly assigned to advocate for accessibility. And when our talent and our audience are literally speaking another language, we need to be prepared to deliver the whole show, captions included, in whatever ways our audience needs it.