NEWSrelease

News from the National Captioning Institute, Inc.

March 16, 2005

NCI Captioning Director Reaches
Momentous 25-Year Milestone

Washington, DC – Rare is the time when a company and one of its employees can celebrate a momentous anniversary together, but such is the case for the National Captioning Institute (NCI) and its Director of Live Captioning Marc Okrand. This year marks the 25th anniversary of closed captioning on network television, and Dr. Okrand was there for the debut on March 16, 1980.

In 1979, the possibility of closed-captioning television programming was still a fledgling concept. The National Captioning Institute was created that year as the first closed-captioning company. In the 10 years prior, the Public Broadcasting Service developed captioning methods and processes, but in order to gain the cooperation of the competing broadcast studios, an unbiased, nonprofit organization had to be formed to provide the service. Thus, NCI was born.

Meanwhile, a young linguist named Marc Okrand was searching for a job in the Washington, D.C. area. A friend had mentioned a closed-captioning company that had just been formed. They discussed the idea of captioning, and Marc was quite interested in the new communication medium. He sent his resume and a letter of interest to the company.

NCI’s Personnel Director was impressed with his credentials, and who wouldn’t be? He has a PhD in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley and taught linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara for several years before moving to Washington, D.C. to do research at the Smithsonian Institution. He sounded perfect for the position of Section Supervisor. She gave Marc a call, invited him to interview for the supervisor position, and soon hired him.

Over the last 25 years, NCI has grown by leaps and bounds, and Marc Okrand has been there through it all. When he started in the company, only prerecorded programs were closed-captioned. Since then, not only has the offline captioning process been streamlined tremendously, but also several new departments have been added. For one, the Live Captioning Department was created in 1981. While others at NCI were working on the technical aspects of the real-time captioning process, Marc helped develop the production techniques needed to provide real-time closed-captioning for live programming such as news and sports.

While only 16 hour per week of prerecorded programs were captioned by NCI when the service was introduced 25 years ago, today, NCI captions hundreds of hours per day of prerecorded and live television programming, commercials, government and corporate videos, videoconferences, Webcasts, and DVDs. NCI also provides subtitling and language translation services plus audio description of programming for people who are blind or have low vision.

Marc’s role in the company also has changed as the need arose. From Section Supervisor, he moved on to the role of Manager of Live Captioning in 1982 and was later promoted to Director of Live Captioning, the position he holds today.

With the high-pressure demands and constant changes of today’s Live Department, what does Marc do to have a little fun? Well, for one, he spends a lot of time as a board member for a professional theatre company in the D.C. area. Also, as a linguist, he has created languages. In fact, die-hard Star Trek fans know Marc well as the inventor of the space-alien language Klingon. In 1982, Marc was on location in California for the first highly publicized live event that NCI ever captioned: the Academy Awards. A spontaneous lunch meeting with a long-time friend who worked for Harve Bennett, the executive producer of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, led to the opportunity. Bennett needed someone to create Vulcan words to replace English in a scene. With his background in linguistics as well as his teaching experience, Marc was a perfect candidate. After creating Vulcan equivalents of the four English lines in the scene, Marc coached Mr. Spock, played by Leonard Nimoy, and a Vulcan woman, played by Kirstie Alley, on how to say their lines.

A few years later, when Star Trek III: The Search for Spock was being written, Bennett again called upon Marc to create a language: Klingon. Since only a few Klingon words existed, he had the freedom to use whatever rules he chose. Since then, he has written three books, recorded two audiotapes, and worked on part of a CD-ROM game related to the Klingon language. He also created the Atlantean language for Disney’s Atlantis: The Lost Empire, with Michael J. Fox. One of Marc’s greatest joys is manipulating language.

When asked why he has stayed with the National Captioning Institute for 25 years, a smile crossed his face. “I like what we’re doing here, and I believe in it. At a lecture I attended where most of the people were deaf or hard of hearing, a deaf man asked a question related to a program that we had recently captioned. If I didn’t do what I do, the man couldn’t have asked the question. It’s nice to be reminded of that once in a while.” Marc continues to play an integral role at NCI of finding new and improved ways to efficiently provide captioning services to reach more people who are unable to hear the spoken word.

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National Captioning Institute
With offices in the Washington, DC metropolitan area (Vienna, VA); Burbank, CA; Dallas, TX; and London, England, the nonprofit National Captioning Institute is the global captioning leader, supplying the highest quality closed captioning and related services for broadcast and cable television, home video and DVD, and government and corporate video programming.

For More Information:

Contact: Jay Feinberg

703-917-7600 (V/TTY)

703-917-9853 (FAX)

jfeinberg@ncicap.org

 

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