Nothing makes captions look careless faster than a misspelled council member's name. A glossary of local names tells SentraCaptions how to spell the words that matter most in your meetings.
Why local names trip up captions
Automatic captions are built for everyday speech. Your meetings are full of words that aren't everyday: the names of members and staff, streets named after early settlers, neighborhoods, creeks, acronyms for local programs and the names of nonprofits that come up every budget season. Many of these are spelled in ways that can't be guessed from how they sound.
A glossary gives captions a list of the names and terms your agency actually uses, so they are spelled right in the captions and carried through into translations and transcripts. Every screen still labels captions as automatic and notes they may contain errors, but the names residents care about most can be right.
What to put in the glossary
Start with the words that come up at almost every meeting, then add the rest over time.
People
- Council members or supervisors, including the mayor or chair
- City manager or county administrator, city attorney or county counsel, clerk
- Department heads and staff who present often
- Commissioners and committee members, if you caption those meetings
Places
- Street and road names, especially ones that come up in planning items
- Neighborhoods, districts and wards
- Parks, community centers, libraries and other facilities
- Creeks, rivers, landmarks and nearby communities
Programs and organizations
- Local program names and their acronyms
- Plans and documents referred to by name, such as your general plan or specific plans
- Partner agencies, school districts, water and special districts
- Community groups and nonprofits that speak regularly
How to build it in an afternoon
- Start from what you have. Your agency roster, the last few agendas and the staff directory already hold most of the names you need.
- Scan recent agendas for repeat terms. Look for street names in planning items, program names in staff reports and acronyms in consent items.
- Ask the people who hear the meetings. The clerk's office, the AV operator and the department that presents most often will know which words are always misheard.
- Write each entry the way it should appear. Use correct capitalization and accents. If an acronym is usually spoken as letters, enter it that way.
- Load it before your next meeting and watch the captions for the names you added.
Keep it current
A glossary is not a one-time task. Build a small habit around it:
- After each election or appointment, add new members and remove the ones who have left.
- Before a big item, scan the staff report for new names: a developer, a project name, a consultant firm, a street that rarely comes up.
- After each meeting, skim the transcript for names that came out wrong and add them. Transcripts are available in every language as TXT or SRT files, which makes this quick.
- When staff changes, update department heads and frequent presenters.
If you run more than one body, such as council, planning commission and committees, the same core list of places and programs helps all of them. Add commissioners and committee members as you start captioning those meetings.
Names in translation
SentraCaptions translates into the languages you choose for each meeting, up to 8 per meeting from 75 supported languages. Personal names and place names are usually best left as they are in the original. A correct English spelling in the glossary helps those names carry through cleanly to the chamber screen, the phone page and the transcripts in every language.
If your community uses a well-known local name for a place in another language, ask staff or community partners who speak that language whether it should be noted. They are the best judges of what residents will recognize.
If your agency uses CivicCA for agendas and meetings, keep the glossary in mind when you build agendas. CivicCA starts captioning when the meeting starts and pauses it for recess and closed session, and captions show on the CivicCA dais display, the public portal and residents' phones, so the names spelled right in your glossary appear consistently in each of those places.
Other things that help accuracy
The glossary handles spelling. Clear audio handles everything else. Ask speakers to use the microphone, keep side conversations away from open mics, and check that the encoder is sending the main chamber mix. See chamber audio tips for better captions for more.