Beg to disagree | Dec 26, 2017 |
Nathalie Schon wrote: What's a professional subtitler? -Someone who charges decent rates (this group is not meant for subtitlers who charge US$3/min and think you can subtitle a tv show in 3 hours) My rates are - according to some prospects - indecently high. The main reason is that my specialty is corporate (institutional, training, product launch) video, where my client has no clue/connection to the video industry, and hence no access to anything other than the finished video itself. Usually no script is provided. Other reasons are that quality is paramount, the company's image will often be at stake; and I must deliver a finished, flawless QA-ed video, sometimes (no more so often) starting from VHS tape. Now and then some audio editing is required (bad sound), and replacing onscreen text too. However when I work on feature films or TV series, using pre-timed templates, my video translation-only rate drops to half, because of the considerably lesser time it takes me to do it. Nathalie Schon wrote: -Someone who works with professional software. I think the "professional" attribute lies on the individual who is doing it, not the software. IMHO a bad driver at the wheel of a shiny new Porsche is as unsafe as with an old jalopy falling apart. No point in having state-of-the art computer-controlled ABS brakes if the driver doesn't know how nor when to use them. A prospect recently selected me to do subtitling work for them, using the quite pricey "professional" subtitling software they adopted as standard, which shall remain nameless here. I downloaded its demo, and tried to subtitle their short test video using it. After three hours trying, I had translated and timed only five subtitles, IMHO quite unsatisfactorily. The software felt like using a B-737 jet to drive the kids to school. As a courtesy, in less than one hour, I had that same video very neatly subtitled using the freeware I always use, and sent them a SRT (not the "professional" proprietary file). I found out I'm not alone. Posts on Facebook by experienced subtitlers showed they had similar issues with that same software. That prospect is reposting their recruitment ads, trying to find subtitlers capable of working with that "professional" software. I always do a cost/benefit analysis on all hard/software I buy. If any of these "professional" subtitling software packages were any better or more efficient than the freeware I use, I's have bought it long ago. Nathalie Schon wrote: -Someone who trained as a subtitler. Questionable. I started out translating video for dubbing, on a client's challenge. He explained me the basics, showed me how he did it, and gave me the video. We were both surprised to discover an innate talent I didn't know I had. The very first video I translated was dubbed verbatim from my script, and the metrics came out great. It is still running somewhere. Of course, over the years I got tons of valuable input from dubbing directors and dubbers. I sat through entire dubbing sessions, to learn exactly what I'd have to do to enable those artists to do a perfect job. Yet I spent 17 years translating for dubbing before I ventured into subtitling. My early works in dubbing involved VHS/U-Matic/Betacam TAPES. When I was about to try my hand at subtitling, video had become digital. I'd no longer need an editing suite, a character generator and a Genlock; a plain-vanilla PC could do the entire job. So I rummaged the web, watched a ton of subtitled videos to see the results, and it took me about four months to adapt my original technique for translation for subtitling, learn time-spotting, QA, burning, and even interactive DVD authoring! Years later, a fellow translator approached me with a subtitling job. She said she had taken a couple of (good, on-site) subtitling courses, but she felt she wouldn't be able to do it like I did. There is no professional license involved. The attempts to create one with Netflix's Hermes number failed miserably, as it is obvious now that many acclaimed pros were flunked, while many first-time adventurers passed. Therefore, for rubberstamping a subtitling translator as "professional" or "amateur", the proof is still in the pudding. | |