Here’s the scenario. Your company has a video and you want to subtitle it from your native language into English. The translation must reflect your voice and identity. So naturally, you ask a trusted English translator to translate the script. They’re not an audiovisual translator, but you have worked with them before, you like their work and they get your writing style. They produce a beautiful translation, and so now you turn to a subtitler to create subtitles. It should be an easy job, because all they need to do is copy over the translation into subtitle format. You tell the subtitler not to touch the translation. You don’t pay them for revision. It’s great as it is. You get the subtitles back, but something’s off. You’re struggling to read them in time. The rhythm of the text is jarring against the speech. Sometimes the order of the sentences has been flipped. How did it go so wrong? After all, you followed your usual translation process.
The thing is, translating a script for subtitles doesn’t work the same way as translating a standard text. Time and space constraints have an impact on the choice of words, the length and the segmentation of the translation. For subtitles that read smoothly and comfortably, the translator must work within subtitling software, translating and timing as they go to adapt the translation as necessary.
So how can translating outside of subtitling software go wrong?
You won’t pay attention to reading speed
One of the main constraints of subtitling is reading speed. Subtitling software tells us how fast a subtitle is depending on the duration of the subtitle and the number of characters. A subtitler not only adapts the translation to these calculations given by the software. They also watch the subtitles against the video to make sure they work well with the image. If there’s a lot going on in the video, then the subtitles will need to be condensed further. Professional subtitlers find creative solutions to express all the important information as concisely as possible. The most beautiful written translation could be the worst subtitle translation. If it’s too long for your audience to read in time, it may as well not exist.
The opposite can also happen. Your translation might be too concise, and it’s only when watching it against the video that it becomes apparent. Instead of focusing on your message, your audience will be wondering why two seconds of speech was translated into one short sentence. And you don’t want that.
You won’t respect sentence structure and rhythm
Omitting a sentence, adding some extra information to explain a cultural reference for the reader, or flipping the order of the translation is totally fine in text translations. The result can be quite different from your source text. But in subtitling, the audio is still present, so subtitlers don’t have that flexibility. People don’t speak perfectly. They pause, hesitate, repeat themselves. If you translate your text before the subtitling stage, the subtitles still have to be synchronised against the original audio. If part of a sentence is deleted, there’ll be a huge gap without a subtitle, or the subtitle before will have to be extended, which will make the audience question what was missing. Even just swapping clauses or grammatical units of a sentence around is confusing if your audience understands both languages.
You’ll overlook the image
If you translate subtitles outside of subtitling software without referring to the video, you can miss important cues in the image and focus too much on the speech. A subtitle translation is inextricably linked to what’s happening on-screen. If you are not referencing the video, your translation might miss out text that needs to be translated for your audience or it could even accidentally contradict the image.
The solution? Trust a professional subtitler with the entire process
You don’t want to pull your viewer out of the video. They shouldn’t even realise they’re reading subtitles, but all these issues are distracting and off-putting. If you want truly adapted, high-quality subtitles, your subtitler will have to rework your script, even translating it from scratch to follow the source audio more closely. That doesn’t mean it’ll be word for word, but the constraints of subtitling will be considered to ensure your subtitles flow well against the audio.
Trusting a professional subtitler from the get-go is quicker and less expensive than going to a text translator and then a subtitler as they do both jobs in one. Most importantly, thanks to beautifully adapted subtitles, your viewers will keep watching your video until the end and focus on your message.
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