“Welcome to the year of the whores” has to be up there as one of the best real-time TV subtitle whoopsies of them all, as the BBC’s Tina Daheley ushered in the Chinese Year of the Horse in 2014. Close behind it is surely presenter Dan Walker referring to the English seaside town Cromer as famous for its “crap” (instead of crabs), and Manchester United midfielder Adnan Januzaj once being subtitled as "Janet Jazz Jazz Jam".
Just last weekend I was watching Formula 1 on a pub TV and noticed how many words the subtitles got wrong (though none to the same bemusement of those notorious blunder examples) or just plainly missed. Live subtitles provide an indispensable service for the deaf and hard of hearing, of course, and I’m not at all here to bash the efforts of hard-working captioners.
