Vocabulary is critical to your success as a stenocaptioner. You must have a well-developed court reporting dictionary, containing all of the specialty terminology for whatever you will be captioning, plus general terms that might come up. Here is a list, offered by Patty White of Caption Colorado and Kevin Daniel of Bay Area Captioning, of some (yes, I said “some”) of what should be in an American news captioner’s dictionary:
- Presidents (past, present, and potential)
- First Ladies
- Cabinet members
- Senate
- House of Representatives
- National figures (government, religious, entertainment, criminal, etc.)
- All the countries in the world and their capitals
- All major U.S. cities and some of the smaller ones
- Geographical information such as mountain ranges, mountain peaks, oceans, rivers, lakes, local creeks
- Meteorological terms, weather terms
- World leaders, including United Nations leaders
- World history terminology, as in Tet Offensive, Bolsheviks, Chairman Mao, etc.
- Major wars, domestic and international
- Terms related to world organizations like NATO, OPEC, etc.
- Nationalities and languages for foreign nations
- Supreme Court Justices and important Supreme Court decisiosn
- Military leaders; Joint Chiefs of Staff; military bases, weapons of war, like A-10 tank killers, F-15s, Tomahawk missiles, Scuds, etc.
- National parks
- Colleges, universities, and their team names
- Local stuff for the area you plan to caption in: landmarks, hospital, junior colleges, prominent people, etc.
- All the professional sports teams, their nicknames, players, and coaches
- Sports terminology, awards and organizations, both amateur and professional
- Makes and models of automobiles
- Major businesses, brand names, trading organizations, stock terms
- Currencies and major banks around the world
- All the colors, and their shades and hues
- Dog and cat breeds
- Food and their measurements and the spices that go with them
- Holidays: Christian, Jewish, and all other faiths
- Special events, like Kwanzaa, Cinco de Mayo, etc.
- Religious structures, like mosques, temples, etc.
- Books of the Bible and of religions around the world
- Basic chemicals
- Drug names and manufacturers, both legal and illegal
- Common first and last names
- World literature, philosophy, and religious terms, like Aesop, orthodox, Buddhism, Eucharist, the brothers Grimm, etc.
- Political terms, like glasnost, apartheid, anarchy, propaganda, caucus, espatriate, Kremlin, Parliament, etc.
- Computer terms
- Commonly used foreign words and phrases, such as adieu, aloha, de rigeur, fait accompli, modus operandi, etc.
This list was originally published in the January 1998 Journal of Court Reporting.
Comments are closed.