![working as a subtitler working as a subtitler](https://www.uv.uio.no/english/research/groups/tepec/pictures/tepec-forside--colourbox10276102.jpg)
Subtitlers are restricted to respeaking a maximum of 15 minutes at a time. Luckily, they’re not asked to speak for two hours straight. That means you talk a lot: while the normal person will speak roughly 10,000 words a day, at their normal work rate a subtitler will fire that off in a couple of hours. You’ve got to repeat what Alex Jones says. Simple, right?īut here’s the thing: there’s more to subtitling than repeating Matt Baker. And, without the noise of the clapping, the computer can produce the caption “Hello and welcome to The One Show” on screen. So, if Matt Baker says “Hello and welcome to The One Show” amongst a backdrop of applause, there'll be a single subtitler somewhere clearly repeating “Hello and welcome to The One Show” into a microphone. It’s a hybrid system – one that relies on a computer and subtitler.
#Working as a subtitler software
It's basically what you’re thinking: as the likes of newsreaders and presenters talk on TV, one of the designated 200 English-speaking subtitlers from across the globe will sit in front of a microphone repeating whatever’s said on air.ĭoing this means a clear voice, free of any background noise, can be processed by specialised audio recognition software that generates captions on the screen.
#Working as a subtitler tv
Live TV shows – and a lot of pre-recorded ones too, especially the ones that get edited close to their broadcast time like Have I Got News for You – get their captions through a technique called ‘respeaking’. Okay then, so how’s subtitling actually done?
![working as a subtitler working as a subtitler](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/1gWpmuHAjsU/maxresdefault.jpg)
The approximately 200 million words subtitled live every year on BBC channels? The captions that are now generated for almost 100% programmes? They’re crafted by an army of subtitlers, people with one of the weirdest – and most challenging – jobs in TV. And the Syntipatico system – the one that created subtitles for ‘Tweezer May’ in BBC comedy W1A? It, alongside any fully automated system, doesn’t actually exist. They're not just IT nerds accustomed to enjoying a fourth coffee break as a dust-covered computer spews out captions in the corner. Reason two: being a subtitler is really hard. It turned out that the mistake actually lay with a single faulty TV – one busted set had carried over subtitles from CBBC's The Dumping Ground to BBC News. That was, as Trump himself would say, fake news. Remember when everyone thought the BBC used ‘the wrong subtitles’ during the US presidential inauguration last year? The first: sometimes subtitlers' mistakes simply aren’t. BBC News report on Prince Harry and Meghan Markle contained a very unfortunate subtitle error.BBC Breakfast’s Dan Walker had to correct this awkward subtitle error.Finally, and equally importantly, the book raises new questions and is written in an engaging and accessible style that I truly hope will inspire many. In addition, Jan Pedersen’s meticulous analysis of subtitling strategies and the parameters that influence them is prime teaching material, and of great interest to practitioners in search of translation solutions. Indeed, the book places subtitling, and AVT more generally, squarely within descriptive translation studies, demonstrating the relevance of its concepts and methodology for AVT, but also the relevance of technology-driven AVT for Translation Studies. It takes the time to introduce and contextualise subtitling within AVT, but then moves on into the very specialized area of subtitling norms and extralinguistic cultural references (ECR’s), by the way of descriptive translation studies, drawing on a vast corpus of original material and a sound theoretical framework. Subtitling Norms for Television is a comprehensive and carefully researched academic study that will soon occupy the bookshelves of translation studies scholars, researchers in AVT and AVT practitioners alike. This book will be of interest to anyone interested in gaining access to state-of-the-art tools for translation analysis, or in learning more about the norms of subtitling, based on empirically reliable and current material. Second, to empirically explore current European television subtitling norms, and to look into future developments in this area. The aim of the book is twofold: first, to provide an advanced and comprehensive model for investigating translation problems in the form of Extralinguistic Cultural References (ECRs). It does so by empirically investigating a large corpus of television subtitles from Scandinavia, one of the bastions of subtitling, along with other European data. This monograph represents a large-scale attempt to provide such attention, by exploring the norms of subtitling for television. In most subtitling countries, those lines at the bottom of the screen are the most read medium of all, for which reason they deserve all the academic attention they can get.