Speaker 1: Thanks for watching. Thank you for watching.

Speaker 2: Thank you for watching.

Speaker 1: It's usually a form of entertainment, also for the illiterate in the society. And there would be a translator in the cinema hall who would entertain the audience by telling them what is written on the screen. Today, subtitles are projected on a film print through modern technology and software.

Speaker 3: Now, electronic subtitles are supposed to laser subtitles, which are just one copy with the subtitles. With electronic subtitles, we've got two copies, two working copies. One. One copy is the film, and the other copy is the subtitles. And the subtitles are projected onto the film. They're not an integral part, but they are projected onto the film so that we're not really interfering with the images. The risk, obviously, is that there may be a lack of synchrony between the subtitles and the actual images, depending on how you are projecting them, although technology, again, has improved vastly.

Speaker 2: So, very often, when the film finishes, you don't get a name credited. Sometimes, if you're lucky, you get the company credited, but not the name of the subtitler. That is very rare, indeed. And it is very rare, indeed, to see it on the DVD. Actually, you never see it on the DVD, although the subtitler is such an important mediator when you want to watch a film, a foreign film.

Speaker 4: Unfortunately, a lot of people don't appreciate how difficult it is to translate. Many people think, oh, you know two languages? You can translate that. Or how many friends? Many friends of mine, even family, might come to me and say, oh, I have this small, two-page text, can you translate it in one hour? I'm like, no, you know, for free. Or people think it's just a matter of speaking two languages. But if you stop and try to translate something, you'll see that there's a lot you need to, well, if you want to produce something good, then there's a lot to be taken into account.

Speaker 3: The first time I was in front of, the subtitle unit, as they were called at the time, it was this very convoluted environment where we had a TV set, where you could watch the images. Then you would also have a VHS player, so that you could play the material that you have received, that will then be connected to a computer, which you might have a very sort of archaic and limited subtitling program. And then you would also have a stopwatch, so that you could then do your technical, within time in and time out. So you can imagine the subjectivity and the alertness of the person.

Speaker 4: A very important technical aspect of subtitles is respecting shot changes. And shot changes are, in a film, you have, for example, you have a scene of, you have me talking here, and then it might be that they're going to cut the scene and go to the subtitle. It might even be that I'm still the one talking, but they're going to show a different scene. And you don't want the subtitles to go over that, unless they stay for quite a while on the screen. Otherwise it's just another information that needs to be processed by the brain very quickly.

Speaker 2: To be aware of when the subtitle needs to appear on screen and when it needs to disappear, from the screen. It normally appears exactly when the voice of the actor starts being heard, starts being psychologically perceived. That's exactly when my subtitle should appear, as if it is answering the unconscious question, what is the actor saying? And then the subtitle comes immediately as the answer, this is what the actor is saying. And then it disappears, normally a bit after the utterance finishes.

Speaker 5: I was lucky enough, to be put in contact with the director of the film, which is extremely rare, I would like to point out nowadays. Because the way the industry works is usually that you have a subtitling company, or a production company, and they subcontract it to maybe another company. And so you're often at the end of a very long chain, and it would be completely unheard of to actually talk to the filmmaker. And her diagnosis goes back to several of my colleagues who are both also really experienced.

Speaker 3: What kind ofress was that for her to start having theandonalÜ to talk about that in sounds? Also what was the most memorable thing you had done in攜짱 일본? First big impact, A big impact in the industry came about with the advent of the DVD. The DVD was a big change technically, but also in terms of distribution. For the first time ever you could have in one single product, you could have the original, plus several languages, plus even if you wanted the dubbed version of that programme as well. And that's when subtitling became a sort of mass production activity.

Speaker 6: You really need to think about which types of words are being distributed where, so if it's conjunctions like because or and they should be in the second line or in the next subtitle, so lots of things like that which are the rules of subtitling.

Speaker 3: Music

Speaker 1: In India, film songs are now screened with subtitles on national television channels. This step is taken by the government to eradicate illiteracy and to encourage people to read and enjoy their favourite music.

Speaker 2: If you think of old days, there are black and white films when there is someone reading a letter, for instance, and then you hear the voice of the person who wrote the letter being heard as the person silently looks at the letter. That has to be in italics as well, because it denotes that the voice is coming from elsewhere.

Speaker 3: What are you going to do?

Speaker 2: What kind of stupid answer is that? What do you want me to do?

Speaker 7: What do you want me to do? While the most emotional experience was the first time that I ever saw SDH being projected in Greece and it was for the Theatre of the Death in Athens where they were projecting a film for the audience and it was the first time that I saw SDH on screen and I just started crying.

Speaker 2: So if you think of how much money and how much energy goes into the making of a film, months of work, a lot of money from the script, the sets, everything, actors, in order to make another visual material. And if you think that all of this effort, all of this sensitivity into very fine points, into fine-tuning the film so that you're happy with the final result, all this can be destroyed from a bad day of subtitling, for instance. That is a very important thing. It's a very important thing to bear in mind.

Speaker 6: Jokes, humour, this is really difficult to translate because sometimes the joke just won't work in your language. So you either need to create a new joke out of the joke, which sometimes is impossible, or just miss the joke completely and just subtitle without the joke. And many people who understand the language, so say if it's English, they'll understand the joke and know that the subtitle doesn't have the joke and get quite annoyed. But it's just very difficult.

Speaker 1: In Brazil, the audience can complain to authorities if they notice bad subtitling in a film. To compensate that subtitling error, the authorities usually send a complimentary DVD to the one who has made the complaint. In China, sexual references in the film would be written in the form of subtitles, but with references to food. For example, if there is a dialogue, stop touching my butt, it would be translated as stop touching my tofu.

Speaker 3: It's very rarely that one would see the name of the subtitler at the end of a film. If you buy a DVD, you probably would never find out who was the subtitler or the translator of that film. Whereas in other areas, for instance literature, it has improved dramatically and many translators will have their name, if not on the front page, very close and very prominently advertised.

Speaker 1: An audience can't enjoy a film that is foreign to them. It is subtitlers who, with their creative skills, bring those films to us. But in this process, they are thriving to survive in this globalised business of the film industry.

Speaker 2: Up to more or less 2000, 2002, these big DVD authoring companies or media companies, they would find their subtitlers locally in very cosmopolitan places, London, where many talented, skilled people come and we would offer our services to these companies and the rates were very good at the time. But what happened is this globalised business was restructured, centralised and then we, subtitlers, were simply outsourced. That means that the companies would, at that time and also with the help of technology, send films and I would say pre-timed subtitles or subtitled files in English, called template files or master files, they would send them abroad and subtitlers from all over the world would send their translated version back to the centre.

Speaker 3: In order to streamline the process of producing subtitles, the technical dimension was taken away from subtitlers and it came to be done by professionals that only know the technicality of the subtitling software and then the translation was left to the subtitlers or the linguists. Breaking the job in such a way, many people were very upset because they would much prefer to work the whole thing from the very beginning to the end themselves, doing the technical dimension and also the linguistic dimension. But once the technical dimension is taken away from the translator, the industry had an excuse to lower rates and claim that they weren't doing as much work as they were doing and then the rates needed to be a bit lower.

Speaker 8: The rates would be, in this particular company, would be per thousand words. In my particular language combination, they were paying £90 per thousand words, which was a very good rate. Eventually, this rate became as low as £50 per thousand words and after that, even worse, when the rates were done by minute per minute program, it was the equivalent of £30 or £25 per thousand words, really. So you can see how much the cuts affected people and their professions. Unfortunately, many of the production,

Speaker 4: even production companies or distributors, they don't really care about that stage. They just want something cheap and quick. So even though they spent two years, three years producing a film, they want the translator to do it in two days. So they don't want to give any information about the film. They might have, for example, a glossary for the actors to know if it's a war film, for example. There might be words from the time they were using and they could pass this on to the translator to help. I'm sure they did a lot of work and a lot of studies to create all of that for the film. But what they do is they just give the film to a company and they want it done in three days, in two days. So it's really difficult.

Speaker 1: An organisation was formed in London called SUTTLE where subtitlers would meet regularly and talk about the issues affecting them.

Speaker 8: The quality of our work is being lost. So, you know, SUTTLE was born also with the idea of campaigning, of finding a way to regulate the profession eventually and to create like, you know, in Bektu, in the Union for Filmmakers, you can see that all the different professions are taken care of. We don't have that. We are alone, basically, with our own resources and being bullied by studios, big studios.

Speaker 5: What we have so far achieved at SUTTLE is that we really linked up with not only other members in the country but also other associations in other European countries and European... The association has been founded last year so we're really trying to work together with other associations on a European level which I think is very important.

Speaker 7: I believe that most subtitlers do not gain the recognition they should in their profession because they are the invisible part of a movie, the invisible part of anything projected on TV or in the cinema or at the theatre. I think that in my case, because I mostly work in the field of accessibility and making things accessible through subtitling and audio description, the role of the subtitler is much more important and more recognised by the audience because they see subtitlers as the medium for communication in general. They see them as the medium that will give them the information that they cannot hear. So they are well respected and they are recognised for what they do and people are grateful about that.

Speaker 9: It was supposed to be a whole series. I got the first two episodes. I worked on them and I got the positive feedback. Okay, I got the go-ahead to continue working on this project. But right before I was supposed to start, they asked me to work for 40% less of the rate I had translated the other two. So I said no and I said I'm sorry. I can't work for you anymore for this rate. And I thought, okay. I was really upset but there was nothing else I could do. And I thought, okay, I've lost a client. Then now I'll have to replace this client. But to my big astonishment and also satisfaction, a couple of months later this client came back to me without any explanation and offered me a job for my rate so I hope that this means that either they weren't able to find people who would work for the rate they were proposing or they were unhappy of the quality.

Speaker 5: Subtitling companies offer European subtitlers to go to places like Indonesia, Canada or India, so low-pay countries, to work there for a year or two for the local fees, which is incredible. But it is really happening. And the third thing is that there are always people who may be starting to the profession who are ready to do that. And this is a big issue in the industry.

Speaker 2: I personally think that the mistake that companies made was that they didn't invest on quality. They only invested on making these profit margins bigger. That means they didn't look for qualified, skilled subtitlers when they outsourced their work abroad. They looked for people who would simply charge lower rates. And that really had an impact on quality. I know this as someone who prefer work that comes from outsourced translations back to me, and obviously there are a lot of mistakes.

Speaker 3: Now we've also seen a move to have a lot of subtitling being done in other countries, particularly in places like Bangalore in India, where there's an emergent trend of having companies dealing with subtitling into all sorts of languages, not just Indian languages, but any language from the world. These are, remember, multinationals. And they are relocating there to drive costs low and to still carry on producing the service that they've been doing so far. There are a lot of ways

Speaker 2: of developing as a subtitler. I would say from personal experience that one should aim to become become generally a language specialist rather than just a subtitler.

Speaker 7: I think the best way to inspire someone to get into their profession and taking it from the point of view of accessibility would be to take them to a place where a film would be projected with subtitling for the deaf and audio description for the blind so that they could see the reaction of the audience and this is the only thing that could keep you very enthusiastic about your job.

Speaker 1: Subtitled films have always been a part of film history but subtitlers themselves who bring these films to us for our entertainment today are being marginalised in the film industry. Subtitlers are an invisible feature of a foreign film and that's how exactly they are being treated in this globalised business of the film industry. Making them look as invisible as possible. Subtitles by the Amara.org community