BBC apologises for gobbledegook subtitles

The BBC today apologised to deaf football fans after its World Cup subtitle service turned live text commentary on screen into gobbledegook during a group stage game.

Viewers who followed the subtitles on Ceefax during Portugal’s clash with Poland found the East European country renamed Holland while the ball became a boule.

Scottish referee Hugh Dallas was christened Huge Dallas, while the Portuguese striker Jao Pinto played as So Pointed and Liverpool and Poland keeper Jerzey Dudek was billed as Dudeback.

A BBC spokesman blamed the fault during Monday’s group D game on the speech recognition machine, which is programmed to turn the voice of a commentator into text within seconds.

The machine confused words it was not used to, particularly foreign names, with other names and words.

The spokesman said: ‘‘Some machines have mistaken the odd word and this caused a few problems during the Portugal-Poland match.

‘‘We apologise to any viewers who experienced any difficult reading the text. However, we still believe this is the quickest way of providing a subtitle service. The alternative, which is having people listen and type out the text, would be far too slow for something like a football game.’’

The spokesman said he did not anticipate the speech recognition machine encountering problems with England team names should the squad progress through the knock-out stages of the tournament.

‘‘Beckham and Owen shouldn’t be too difficult for it to turn into the correctly spelled text,’’ he added.