Forum: Subtitling
Topic: Subtitling rates
Poster: subtitleinsider
Post title: Titles per minute
[quote]José Henrique Lamensdorf wrote:
The time it took me to do it varied significantly. One 90-min movie took me less than a day, though its dialogue load was absolutely normal. Another one, 130 minutes long, took me three entire days.
The fact that we charge per minute of playing time is a matter of using an average for convenience. It's the only way to enable the client to safely budget their project, and it disregards the translator's efficiency (which is of no concern to the client). [/quote]
There are two main elements that go into how long the subtitle translation process takes: volume and difficulty. For example, drama content has an average of 10 titles per minute, documentary content 14, and comedy content 16. For documentary content additional time is required to do proper research, where for comedy content additional time is required to to translate humor. The two elements combined can make translating a documentary or comedy require double the amount of time a drama of similar length would take. (Often not taken into account: shorter programming has a higher overhead-per-minute ratio for non-translation activities like e-mail correspondence, billing, etc.)
I understand the need of clients to set budgets based on runtime rather than the hours spent per individual translator, but that rate structure ought to take genre into account.
Topic: Subtitling rates
Poster: subtitleinsider
Post title: Titles per minute
[quote]José Henrique Lamensdorf wrote:
The time it took me to do it varied significantly. One 90-min movie took me less than a day, though its dialogue load was absolutely normal. Another one, 130 minutes long, took me three entire days.
The fact that we charge per minute of playing time is a matter of using an average for convenience. It's the only way to enable the client to safely budget their project, and it disregards the translator's efficiency (which is of no concern to the client). [/quote]
There are two main elements that go into how long the subtitle translation process takes: volume and difficulty. For example, drama content has an average of 10 titles per minute, documentary content 14, and comedy content 16. For documentary content additional time is required to do proper research, where for comedy content additional time is required to to translate humor. The two elements combined can make translating a documentary or comedy require double the amount of time a drama of similar length would take. (Often not taken into account: shorter programming has a higher overhead-per-minute ratio for non-translation activities like e-mail correspondence, billing, etc.)
I understand the need of clients to set budgets based on runtime rather than the hours spent per individual translator, but that rate structure ought to take genre into account.