Captioning a fundraising dinner

We were honoured to be captioning a fundraising dinner for Associatia Children’s High Level Group (ACHLG) in Belgravia a few days ago.  This charity helps disabled and deaf children in Romania to lead more fulfilling lives. This was a high profile event in the Romanian embassy, attended by Lords, Ladies and ministers. The 121 Captions team was very excited to have a night of fun with a Romanian banquet, musical performer Grigore Lese, Maria Raducanu, and a top chef flown in from Romania – and the entire event was live captioned by us.

A most important element was preparation before the event. We had to be sure that the event venue and organisers would facilitate our online caption service. We were sent names of the presenters at the event, scripts, agenda, and slides well in advance. This really helps the captioner to ensure she has all the words and names in her dictionary, as the captioning will be enhanced by adding short forms into her dictionary for these words before the event. She was then able to, for example, quickly and accurately write the name of the chef Mircea Dinescu and all the names of the Romanian wine and food that he spoke about before dinner.

The next step in our preparation was the sound check. A member of our team went to the embassy the day before and set up an audio test for the captioner, who was in the USA, with the gracious help of the Romanian embassy’s deputy director. We were all set for the exciting event.

Online captioning streamed to a mobile phone during the auction

During dinner, we listened to speeches from the Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne and the Minister of Education, among others. The auction was fast and furious! We were able to follow it all as the captioning only took 1 second to come through to our smartphones. It was fantastic to be involved and be able to join in, as most of the 121 Captions team is deaf. It was a really fun night and such an enjoyable way to help the charity Associatia Children’s High Level Group.

Tina Lannin (Director), Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne, Suzie Jones (Training Manager)