Over dinner I have been watching the rugby match between the Ospreys and Ulster. To be honest, it wasn’t much of a game. Ulster were shut out and leaked 6 tries. But it was hugely entertaining. Why? Well it was on S4C, and as neither my mother nor I speak much Welsh we had the English language subtitles enabled. I have no idea how this is being done, but it is being done very badly. For example, when a possible try went to video replay it was pretty obvious that what the commentators had said was, “Ryan Jones thinks he’s got it,” but the subtitles said, “Ryan Jones thinks he’s God.” And then there was the point where the subtitles came up with, “The obvious thing to do is arrange loans to pass the ball to Shane Williams.” I knew rugby salaries were on the up, but I didn’t know that Shane had become that expensive!

Given that the subtitles often got the players’ names wrong (“James Fox” for James Hook, “Gamin Henson”) I suspect that there is some voice recognition software in there somewhere. I think what is happening is that someone with a Welsh accent is translating what the commentators say on the fly, and that audio feed in being put through voice recognition software that was trained on American accents. Either that or the whole thing is being done by a troupe of enthusiastic but very confused monkeys.