Forum: Subtitling
Topic: Subtitle translation - 60 min talk video/12,000 words - expected time?
Poster: Mr. Satan
Post title: Subtitling Time
In general, professional subtitlers would require four to six days to translate a 90-minute feature film containing roughly around 8,000 words, with a master template provided by the client/agency. What you’re describing, however, seems to fall under the territory of corporate videos, which is typically more verbose and may be more anarchistic. What do I mean by “anarchistic”? Well, commercial films always follow movie-making conventions. But when we’re talking about corporate videos, the team behind their creation isn’t* always savvy about these guidelines. The cinematic quality varies wildly between audiovisual productions, so it’s hard to implement the same rule that fits all scenarios. It sounds like the timecodes from your client are raw data as well, without any subtitle boxes assigned to them. Just to be safe, I usually try to ask for one to three extra days to finish such projects. It’s also worth noting, that many subtitlers charge higher rates for translating corporate videos, up to 150% or even 200% more than their rates for working on entertainment contents.
To put these into application, let’s say you can make 30 minutes of progress from the total video duration in a standard eight-hour working day. Divide 30 minutes by eight, and you’ll get three minutes of progress per hour (I’m leaning towards the slower side here). I don’t know how much your hourly rate is. But for the sake of giving an example, I’ll simply set it as EUR 45. Divide 45 by three, and you shall get EUR 15 per runtime minute rate to offer.
[quote]Zea_Mays wrote:
The first thing I told the client was to shorten the copy to the relevant parts and omit all other things.[/quote]
It’s the responsibility of the subtitler to distill dialogues and omit hesitations, false starts, and any other rhetoric features that don’t add any new information to the meaning of the texts, or even polluting them with irrelevant details. In fact, this very practice is why subtitling is considered as a multisemiotic and multimodal translation, with one profound case being the translation from oral and visual formats into timed texts on top of interlingual and intercultural transfer. SDH/CC has different yet self-contradicting approaches. But this is a controversial subject to be discussed for another day. 7:^)
HTH, FWIW.
*Now, before a certain Briton criticize my English, I speak the American variation. The noun “team” agrees with the singular verb in this part of the world. Deal with it.
[url removed]
[url removed]
[Edited at 2023-05-10 09:51 GMT]
Topic: Subtitle translation - 60 min talk video/12,000 words - expected time?
Poster: Mr. Satan
Post title: Subtitling Time
In general, professional subtitlers would require four to six days to translate a 90-minute feature film containing roughly around 8,000 words, with a master template provided by the client/agency. What you’re describing, however, seems to fall under the territory of corporate videos, which is typically more verbose and may be more anarchistic. What do I mean by “anarchistic”? Well, commercial films always follow movie-making conventions. But when we’re talking about corporate videos, the team behind their creation isn’t* always savvy about these guidelines. The cinematic quality varies wildly between audiovisual productions, so it’s hard to implement the same rule that fits all scenarios. It sounds like the timecodes from your client are raw data as well, without any subtitle boxes assigned to them. Just to be safe, I usually try to ask for one to three extra days to finish such projects. It’s also worth noting, that many subtitlers charge higher rates for translating corporate videos, up to 150% or even 200% more than their rates for working on entertainment contents.
To put these into application, let’s say you can make 30 minutes of progress from the total video duration in a standard eight-hour working day. Divide 30 minutes by eight, and you’ll get three minutes of progress per hour (I’m leaning towards the slower side here). I don’t know how much your hourly rate is. But for the sake of giving an example, I’ll simply set it as EUR 45. Divide 45 by three, and you shall get EUR 15 per runtime minute rate to offer.
[quote]Zea_Mays wrote:
The first thing I told the client was to shorten the copy to the relevant parts and omit all other things.[/quote]
It’s the responsibility of the subtitler to distill dialogues and omit hesitations, false starts, and any other rhetoric features that don’t add any new information to the meaning of the texts, or even polluting them with irrelevant details. In fact, this very practice is why subtitling is considered as a multisemiotic and multimodal translation, with one profound case being the translation from oral and visual formats into timed texts on top of interlingual and intercultural transfer. SDH/CC has different yet self-contradicting approaches. But this is a controversial subject to be discussed for another day. 7:^)
HTH, FWIW.
*Now, before a certain Briton criticize my English, I speak the American variation. The noun “team” agrees with the singular verb in this part of the world. Deal with it.
[url removed]
[url removed]
[Edited at 2023-05-10 09:51 GMT]