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How To Make The Most Of Your Subtitling Solutions

Subtitling is one of the most widely used localization methods; whether it’s for big Hollywood movies or for interviews necessary for documentaries or company-related sensitive information, there’s no denying it’s one of the best ways to bring language and culture together. Subtitling is becoming more and more important with globalization given that people’s interest in hearing a movie or an interview in the source language and being able to understand it at the same time has grown immensely in the last few decades.

It’s for this reason that we are ready to handle subtitling jobs on a daily basis and face the unique challenges this brings, such as difficult technical dialogues, several speakers conversing at the same time or merely the difficult task of conveying the same sentence from one language into another one, maintaining the same meaning.

When subtitling, translators are faced with dialog which tends to be informal unlike the usual formal and technical languages used in writing, therefore the care and handling of such projects are done in a different manner without forgetting that informal speech is usually plagued with country-specific slang, idioms and cultural references which are even more difficult than the translation of the structure of the text itself. This is a stylistic problem, given that if literal translations are included, the audience will be confused and downgrade the quality of the show/documentary.

For this reason, we not only adapt languages to a target audience, but also respect local and cultural aspects, making your subtitle convey the actual message.

A video screen is not of unlimited length; hence a subtitle project is restricted in length as well, making it sometimes difficult to handle the text while maintaining the message intact.  The eye of the reader/viewer is able to process only a limited amount of words per second; therefore, the subtitle must meet these criteria and the linguist, while doing the subtitle, should respect the length of each line of text and the amount of lines. It gets even more complicated to handle such tasks, when a style guide is applicable. Especially large production firms producing shows, documentaries or movies, have such style guides in place.

To summarize, subtitling is in general norm-governed, but the best way to provide a good translation is to retain the local meaning of the video while remaining faithful to the source language’s expressions. It should flow naturally and be easy to read.

Wagner´s approach – A quick insight look

  1. Each video is checked and assessed for Audio and Video Quality.
  2. Using our innovative servers, the subtitler uses our custom software to carefully transcribe the audio content into text and any other hard text burnt into the video. All technical and unfamiliar terms are researched thoroughly.
  3. If a transcription and time coding is needed, we put our transcriptionist on this task and generate a monolingual file, afterwards put our translation team into action to create a time coded translated file.
  4. The finalized translation is sent back to the subtitler for a final formatting and adjustment according the client’s specification then exported in a final (target language) subtitle file.

We can render subtitles into a variety of formats (.srt, .ass, .sub, .vkt, .scr, .mpl, .txt, .rt, .smi, .sami, .sbt, .sst) and burn them into the video itself so no selection of the subtitle is required (hard subtitles).

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If you wish to receive a detailed offer on or consultation on subtitling, transcription or timecoding solutions provided by Wagner Consulting, then please feel free to contact our Sales Team, who will gladly assist you.

Subtitling Division at Wagner Consulting
Phone:
US: (718) 838 9533
EU: (718) 618 4268
E-Mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

    

If you wish to speak to someone in your area, please send us an email with your request and one of our colleagues will get back to you.