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Quick Google:
In the U.S., we rarely see the news interpreted into ASL, so I’m guessing that you’re seeing this in some other country — possibly the U.K. But there are a lot of good reasons why you see interpreters rather than captioning.
- The captions are probably there, but they’re closed captions, so you have the option to turn them on or off as desired.
- Captions are not always accurate. You will often see phonetic transcription errors, signal garbling, changes in the rate of speed in caption scrolling, and a number of other issues, all of which can hinder comprehension of what was said.
- In the news, live, unscripted commentary often goes uncaptioned because they caption the main portion ahead of time. And this of course, leaves us wondering what was said and without access to the additional details that were provided in this section.
- Many Deaf are, unfortunately, not fluent in the majority Hearing language, and may not understand the captions, or misunderstand the content due to linguistic conflicts and comprehension issues.
- Captions cannot provide tone or emotional information— Interpreters can do this. Also, interpreters can keep up with the spoken commentary much better than captions sometimes. For many Deaf, they would prefer to see interpreted information rather than through captions because after all, it is our primary, if not native language, and I’m sure you’d prefer to get your news information in the language you use everyday rather than your second language, which you might not be entirely fluent in.