Forum: Subtitling
Topic: How fast can you translate subtitles? Is it worth doing?
Poster: José Henrique Lamensdorf
Post title: Amateurs abound
[quote]Taru Laiho wrote:
I think that the major problem with translating subtitles is the fact that there really seem to be so many people (mostly students or people with no formal language education, I should think) who are willing to work for peanuts. If I were the CEO of a company that publishes TV shows/movies which need to have subtitles, I don't think I would pay a decent wage if I knew I could get the job done cheaper (even if realised that the quality might not be as good). That's just how it goes - those companies have to make some profit, too, to keep the business up and running.[/quote]
Anyone can find hundreds of sites on the web offering free subtitles for thousands of movies in dozens of languages. Translation quality usually varies from very bad to horrible. Spotting is often worse.
My take is that these people are doing it for fun, in an attempt to develop quality to eventually apply as professional subtitlers. The problem is that since nobody will hold them accountable for any level of quality, nobody will ever give them feedback, they will NEVER improve to any barely acceptable quality standard.
For those here who can read Brazilian Portuguese, I did an experiment, comparing the full professional translation o one TV series ("Bones") episode with a "very bad" amateur translation of the same, on the table at [url removed] .
Last Christmas, I had the time to spare, so I did a larger experiment. One of my questions I was trying to get answered was whether it's worthwhile to have subtitles translated and time-spotted by a cheap amateur, and later 'fixed' by a pro. So I took the 124-min feature movie "Now You See Me", and tried to fix a set of very popular (by the number of downloads) but clearly horrible, quality-wise, amateur (fansubber) subtitles in Brazilian Portuguese.
I intend to write and publish a complete report on the experiment and its various conclusions (other issues covered as well). For the time being, I can definitely say that NO, it's NOT cost effective to have a pro 'fixing' an amateur's subtitles, as this requires about the same time and effort as redoing it all from scratch. Furthermore, as the pro gets overwhelmed with so many flaws to fix, anything that is barely acceptable will be left as-is, while a fresh translation by that pro would be certainly better.
Topic: How fast can you translate subtitles? Is it worth doing?
Poster: José Henrique Lamensdorf
Post title: Amateurs abound
[quote]Taru Laiho wrote:
I think that the major problem with translating subtitles is the fact that there really seem to be so many people (mostly students or people with no formal language education, I should think) who are willing to work for peanuts. If I were the CEO of a company that publishes TV shows/movies which need to have subtitles, I don't think I would pay a decent wage if I knew I could get the job done cheaper (even if realised that the quality might not be as good). That's just how it goes - those companies have to make some profit, too, to keep the business up and running.[/quote]
Anyone can find hundreds of sites on the web offering free subtitles for thousands of movies in dozens of languages. Translation quality usually varies from very bad to horrible. Spotting is often worse.
My take is that these people are doing it for fun, in an attempt to develop quality to eventually apply as professional subtitlers. The problem is that since nobody will hold them accountable for any level of quality, nobody will ever give them feedback, they will NEVER improve to any barely acceptable quality standard.
For those here who can read Brazilian Portuguese, I did an experiment, comparing the full professional translation o one TV series ("Bones") episode with a "very bad" amateur translation of the same, on the table at [url removed] .
Last Christmas, I had the time to spare, so I did a larger experiment. One of my questions I was trying to get answered was whether it's worthwhile to have subtitles translated and time-spotted by a cheap amateur, and later 'fixed' by a pro. So I took the 124-min feature movie "Now You See Me", and tried to fix a set of very popular (by the number of downloads) but clearly horrible, quality-wise, amateur (fansubber) subtitles in Brazilian Portuguese.
I intend to write and publish a complete report on the experiment and its various conclusions (other issues covered as well). For the time being, I can definitely say that NO, it's NOT cost effective to have a pro 'fixing' an amateur's subtitles, as this requires about the same time and effort as redoing it all from scratch. Furthermore, as the pro gets overwhelmed with so many flaws to fix, anything that is barely acceptable will be left as-is, while a fresh translation by that pro would be certainly better.
