Forum: Subtitling
Topic: per video minute rate Spanish to English
Poster: subtitleinsider
Post title: Content and speed
Your speed will largely depend on the content. Typical subtitling will have about 10 subtitles per minute. If you give yourself about a minute per subtitle, you could do 6 minutes of programming per labor hour, or one hour of programming per 10 hours of labor. At $3.00 per minute, you would make $18 per labor hour before taxes.
When you are starting out and/or if there is more dialogue or more difficult dialogue than is typical, you likely will be able to do less programming, so you will earn less than that $18 per labor hour. Sixty seconds per subtitle may seem like a lot, but you will inevitably have to do some research for certain subtitles, and that research can, for example, take 5 minutes for a single title, which then increases the average of all other titles.
Netflix's published 2016 rate card paid subtitle vendors $12.00 per minute for translating Latin American Spanish into English. I think experienced subtitle translators should insist on receiving at least half of that rate for their translation work (leaving the other half for the review work, the creation of the spotting template, general management of the project, etc.), so you should likely aim for $6.00 per minute at a minimum, if we assume Netflix's "market rates" are indeed fair market rates. (They claimed to have set those rates by doing market rate research and then adding 10% on top of it. But they did so at a time when the market rates had already been aggressively depressed by major movie studios.)
If you have no experience in the field, it may seem attractive to accept lower rates in order to gain experience, but just be forewarned that the general trend in subtitling has been that the rates paid for translation have steadily been reduced, part of which is caused by so many translators willing to accept low rates. So by the time you acquire the experience from doing low-paid jobs, well-paid jobs may pay the same as low-paid jobs pay now.
Topic: per video minute rate Spanish to English
Poster: subtitleinsider
Post title: Content and speed
Your speed will largely depend on the content. Typical subtitling will have about 10 subtitles per minute. If you give yourself about a minute per subtitle, you could do 6 minutes of programming per labor hour, or one hour of programming per 10 hours of labor. At $3.00 per minute, you would make $18 per labor hour before taxes.
When you are starting out and/or if there is more dialogue or more difficult dialogue than is typical, you likely will be able to do less programming, so you will earn less than that $18 per labor hour. Sixty seconds per subtitle may seem like a lot, but you will inevitably have to do some research for certain subtitles, and that research can, for example, take 5 minutes for a single title, which then increases the average of all other titles.
Netflix's published 2016 rate card paid subtitle vendors $12.00 per minute for translating Latin American Spanish into English. I think experienced subtitle translators should insist on receiving at least half of that rate for their translation work (leaving the other half for the review work, the creation of the spotting template, general management of the project, etc.), so you should likely aim for $6.00 per minute at a minimum, if we assume Netflix's "market rates" are indeed fair market rates. (They claimed to have set those rates by doing market rate research and then adding 10% on top of it. But they did so at a time when the market rates had already been aggressively depressed by major movie studios.)
If you have no experience in the field, it may seem attractive to accept lower rates in order to gain experience, but just be forewarned that the general trend in subtitling has been that the rates paid for translation have steadily been reduced, part of which is caused by so many translators willing to accept low rates. So by the time you acquire the experience from doing low-paid jobs, well-paid jobs may pay the same as low-paid jobs pay now.
