Nathan VanderKlippe
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Apr 19/02) - Sitting in the front corner of a University of Alberta classroom, her feet sitting in a jumble of power cords and data wires, Shaunna Kossatz is writing English.

But it's not the English you or I know. It's a kind of Hooked on Phonics for professionals, in which every word she hears is based on how it sounds.

Kossatz is a captioner. She transcribes speech into text, and does it at up to 260 words per minute. When she types -- or writes, as it's known -- it's like making music, playing a melody of nouns, verbs and adjectives. Her fingers dance across her keyboard with the speed of a concert pianist, creating chords that aren't music but words.

Big words. Words like "unidimensionality." Words her fingers instantly translate into fully-punctuated sentences on a laptop screen. Words that the student sitting beside her in educational psychology 508 can't hear.

But this is only a warmup. On April 22, Kossatz won't be wading through the garble of a grad class. She will be leaning forward in concentration, attuning herself to the rhythm of a master orator, Maya Angelou.

Then, sitting in a sound booth nestled in the wall of Edmonton's Winspear Centre, her fingers will ride the undulations of Angelou's voice, writing poetry for an audience of 1,800.

"I feel a little bit intimidated," she says, "but at the same time I don't."

Fly on the wall

Kossatz spent two years at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT), learning to be what she is now.

As a 16-year-old growing up in Yellowknife, Kossatz had been fascinated by the idea of just listening.

"I liked being the fly on the wall," she says.

"I found that really intriguing -- not having a part of what's going on but hearing things."

Her guidance counsellor dissuaded her from getting into court reporting: Surely recording devices would quickly supplant that occupation.

But the idea stuck with her, and when she began looking for a change of pace in life, she discovered that the industry was booming.

The new job title was captioning, and transcription skills were in high demand for television -- even for businesses who wanted instant text records. An aging population whose hearing is getting collectively worse made for a burgeoning market.

Better yet, American legislation is creating enormous opportunities for captioners. This January, the Americans with Disabilities Act mandated a doubling in live captioning. By 2006, all American live broadcasts must be captioned, and Canadian television is following suit.

The opportunities are limitless, and changes in American legislation will also affect Canada. Some Canadian-based captioners work for TV stations all over the U.S., using a phone line to hear newscasters' voices and a modem to transfer back the text.

So Kossatz went to NAIT.

She graduated in spring 2001. Now a freshly-minted captioner, she plies her trade with the same technology as a court reporter: a stenotype machine.

Using this device, Kossatz doesn't clack one key per letter like a computer keyboard. Instead, the 24-key machine lets her simultaneously press down combinations of keys, much like chords on a piano.

And like chords, each combination represents a different sound. So when she hears "political," she takes two strokes to enter "PLIT/KAL." Her laptop then takes those two strokes and translates them into "political."

"That's why we call it writing. We put words together," she says. "It's like a completely different language."

While captioners get faster with practice, they also get better with software. Old-timers have created detailed shortcuts and hefty electronic vocabularies. For example, a court reporter can simplify "ladies and gentlemen of the jury" to one stroke.

Get rhythm

Vocabularies need to be constantly updated. When Kossatz helps out hearing-impaired students, she reads through the same textbooks as they do, familiarizing herself with the names and technical words in a lesson.

Often, she doesn't even know what she is typing. It's not that she can't understand the subject matter. It's just that her years of school taught her not to think.

"It's a psycho-motor skill," she says: when she hears a spoken word, her reaction is automatic.

In fact, the writing process is so ingrained in her consciousness that she finds herself visualizing word patterns during conversation.

"I write what people are saying in my head all the time. It's automatic -- I write everything I see," she says.

Because a captioner can work any number of different jobs, being an "all-rounder" is crucial.

Captioning school includes courses on current events, grammar, medical and legal transcription, even farming and mechanics.

Grammar is particularly important. For instance, the difference in meaning between "I, like you," and "I like you" is significant, and missing the commas could be embarrassing.

"You have to know almost everything there is to know in the world because you hear words you've never heard before," Kossatz says.

"I have to get used to the rhythm," she adds. "It's totally about rhythm."