![]() ![]() Outsourcing, she said, “leaves little left in the hands of the actual translators” and she believes there is a lack of motivation to train professionals.Another pressure for translators in today’s market is time. Silhee Jin, president of the Korea Association of Translators and Interpreters and a professor at Chung-Ang University in Seoul, puts subtitle inconsistencies down to “chronic underpayment”, adding that it “discourages the right people from making a start in the market, and in some cases resorting to cheap machine translation solutions with minimal human involvement”. “Knowing that these multibillion-dollar companies refuse to pay a few more dollars to an experienced professional, and instead opt for the lowest bidder with mediocre quality, only speaks to their greed and disrespect not only for the craft of translation, but the art created by the film-makers they employ.” While in many ways an invisible art form, subtitles have the power to spark intense debate when they go wrong, as demonstrated by the criticism of Squid Game. ‘Shortage’ is always capitalist speak for ‘we don’t want to pay’.”Ĭiting Pablo Romero-Fresco, honorary professor of translation and film-making at Roehampton University, who writes that more than 50% of revenue obtained by most films comes from translated and accessible versions, yet only 0.01-0.1% of budget is spent on them, Leonoudakis said: “Translation is a huge profit enabler for studios and streaming services. The problem is that companies don’t want to pay for the highly experienced translators that are available. Speaking out on Twitter, Los Angeles-based Japanese-to-English audiovisual translator Katrina Leonoudakis wrote: “Like every other industry that requires skilled labour, the problem isn’t that there’s a ‘shortage’. Many subtitle translators are bound by rules that prevent them from revealing what work they have done and for whom. Then, of course, that affects the quality – it becomes worse.” The problem is that companies don’t want to pay for the highly experienced translators that are available This, he says, is leading the most experienced translators to leave the field for better-paid translation jobs or to switch professions entirely: “When the most experienced veteran subtitlers quit, they are quickly replaced with who? Amateurs, part-timers, students, people like that. We have insane volumes of work.” Instead, what he sees is widespread stress and burnout as subtitle translators try to make ends meet. In theory, he added: “It should be a golden moment. It goes all the way to almost zero,” said Max Deryagin, chair of the British Subtitlers’ Association and a representative of Audiovisual Translators Europe. Translators are paid per minute of programme time – even though a single minute of screen time can take hours to accurately and succinctly translate and subtitle – and usually work for outsourced companies known as language service providers (LSPs). ![]() “The industry is experiencing a talent crunch because there aren’t enough experts in the subject and enough people qualified to be working in this field,” he said. Professor Jorge Díaz-Cintas of the Centre for Translation Studies at University College London said that streaming platforms, which used to be largely dominated by English-spoken productions, have become “truly global”, and this, combined with the pandemic, has led to an explosion of demand. Photograph: Youngkyu Park/Netflix/AFP/Getty Images Netflix’s South Korean sensation Squid Game has been criticised for its subtitling inaccuracies. “It’s great to have a job like that, but not if you need to side-fund it with your savings. But the pay, which she says can work out at below minimum wage, makes it unsustainable as a single source of income. Wanders, who translates English into German for streaming vendors, including one of the world’s largest subtitling companies, enjoys the job, which she finds both creative and challenging. It’s not worth your time,’” said the 40-year-old from Dortmund, Germany. “It’s so sad that if anyone would ask me: ‘Oh, I saw this job listing, should I try to become a subtitle translator?’ I would have to tell them: ‘No you shouldn’t. ![]() So bad is the status quo that after two years in the industry, freelance translator and copywriter Anne Wanders would discourage others from going into it at all. But despite their crucial and highly skilled role, acting as conduits between the action on screen and millions of viewers around the world, the translators who painstakingly write the streamers’ subtitles – some of whom may be paid as little as $1 (75p) per minute of programme time – do not appear to have seen the rewards filtering down to them
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