This Sunday, Mr. Bendito aka Bad Bunny opened up the 2023 Grammy Awards with one of his famous hits “Después de la Playa” performing the song in Spanish brought all guests attending up on their feets to merengue and mambo away to the outstanding performance.
But for all live award shows, networks provide a close-captioning for individuals who are deaf or have slight hearing loss to be able to enjoy the award ceremony, however for Bunny’s performance and speech the captions only displayed the following text: “SINGING NON-ENGLISH” or “SPEAKING NON-ENGLISH.”
According to Deadline, there were a few viewers who posted a few of their thoughts to social media to speak about CBS not transcribing Bunny’s performance nor his speech during the awards ceremony – but others performances and speech being thoroughly transcribed during when on screen.
This closed caption seems rude & ethnicity insensitive. Non-English? How about Spanish. Fix it Bad Bunny. @GRAMMYAdvocacy pic.twitter.com/doBv5lUYJF
— Dish Central by C.J. (@DishCentral) February 6, 2023
Shout out to Bad Bunny for giving his thank you speech in full Spanish. Step it up #BBMAs and get those closed caption. Not everything has to be in English on tv
— The Rehearsal Room (M.A.D.E. Productions llc) (@MissAshleeDance) May 24, 2021
Viewers feel as though that even though CBS did not know that Bunny was gonna win an award, they were informed that he will be opening up with a song in Spanish and should’ve made better preparations to have someone who is multilingual to work on close captions for the night to prevent this incident from occurring.