Multilingual DVD: The art of subtitling

The Canadian film-maker Atom Egoyam recently edited a collection of essays in a book entitled Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film in which he stated that, “Every film is a foreign film to someone.” It’s a phrase that seems relevant nowhere more than in the world of DVD and yet is so often overlooked in today’s cut-and-thrust DVD production cycle, says JAMES GARDNER.

Ever since the birth of DVD, everyone from the Hollywood majors to independent production companies, via newly sprouting authoring facilities has been forced to “deal” with subtitles as an integral part of getting the DVD product onto the shelves.

SUBTITLING TURNS PROFESSIONAL

This phenomenon was completely new. Previously, the studios would quite often leave it up to their local distributors to arrange for subtitles to be created for their theatrical releases, using translators known personally to the territory representatives. In the home video market, it was quite often someone completely different but equally removed from the big film centres in London and Hollywood who would take care of translating their product into the local language.

Suddenly, at some point in the late ‘90s, horror-struck DVD types who thought their new glamorous product was all shiny plastic and animated menus realised they had to get down and dirty with subtitling companies and their bitmaps, nav files and anti-aliasing. Not to mention affronted local distributors determined to reject every other subtitle stream because it didn’t contain the right amount of local “flavour”.

I’m exaggerating, of course, but in the early days of DVD, providing subtitles to big, scary movie studios and professional-looking authoring houses with funky couches in reception was a pretty hair-raising experience. And when it comes to subtitling, everyone has an opinion, whether they speak the language concerned or not.

I remember one incident with not so fond memories where a French-speaking secretary at one film-making major took exception at the translation for a line spoken by a female lead character. “You think I haven’t got the balls for this” was translated as, “Vous pensez que je n’ai pas les couilles pour ça.” Without going into detail, said secretary thought this woman would never utter the word “couilles” and all hell broke loose.

The secretary told the financial controller, who told the local studio boss and before I knew it, we were hauled over the coals for dumbing down their product. It was a hard lesson to learn but a revelation for all of us: subtitles had unexpectedly become important to all those concerned in the DVD production chain.

From a production point of view, the delivery of subtitles to the DVD authoring facility can be a pretty mammoth task. Subtitles used to be a post-post-production process. The advent of DVD made them a major part of the post-production process. When you’re supplying subtitles in 23 languages for the same DVD, there’s a lot of planning needed and a lot that can go wrong.

DEMANDING PROCESS

The first thing that the authoring house and client need to bear in mind is that the subtitling facility can only begin their work once they have a number of key elements in place.

First up is the source video. This is still very often delivered to the subtitling facility on VHS – one per language, burned-in timecode (BITC) at the top centre of the screen, with corresponding VITC timecode. No BITC at the bottom of the screen – that’s where our subtitles are going to be. No LTC timecode – you’d be amazed where that annoying loud noise ends up, even if the subtitling house specifically requests it on a single track. And especially, no “rough cut”, “pre-edit”, “VHS release” or anything else that isn’t a direct copy of the compressed master.

Subtitles cannot be magically snapped back into place following a last-minute edit of the feature or documentary, especially not 23 different subtitle streams, so asking your subtitling house to turn around an edited version in a day may be a bit of a tall order.

HANDLING BONUSES

While we’re on the subject of source material, bear in mind that, if you require the subtitling facility to subtitle bonus features such as making-ofs, featurettes and so on, it’s not usually a good idea to hand those out before they’ve seen the main feature.
Can you imagine a translator who may not have had the chance to see The Matrix trying to fathom what John Gaeta is going on about during a 20-minute feature on Bullet Time? Or worse, translating a making-of about Escape from New York and mistakenly thinking Snake Plissken is a girl?

Video is only half the story, of course. It is particularly useful for the subtitling company to have a professionally-created combined continuity and spotting list (or CCSL).

For the uninitiated, this is an extremely detailed, well-researched script that not only features all the verbatim dialogue in the original feature but also suggests edited versions of the dialogue for subtitling and dubbing purposes.

More importantly, CCSLs contain explanations of tricky parts of dialogue for the translators and, of course, “official” spellings of characters’ names. There’s nothing more satisfying for a subtitling company than to be able to point to the studio-supplied script if a complaint ever arises about the spelling of some obscure Pluto-dwelling alien’s name.

RE-USING EXISTING MATERIAL

One other common piece of source material supplied to the subtitling facility is existing subtitle or caption files. In the early days of DVD, it didn’t occur to many distributors that, rather than pay for a new translation of their movie, they could locate previously translated subtitle files (those used for the theatrical release, for example, or a previous VHS version) and forward these to the subtitling facility to re-timecue and edit.

In a way, this was a godsend. You would not believe the two-and-eight of some of these files. Ancient translations from a lost age, when street-fighters used to address their white-trash girlfriends in the formal “you”; unedited three-line closed captions in capital letters that are impossible to read before the next one flashes up on screen; and subtitle “files” from Eastern Europe that are effectively bastardized Windows 3.1 Excel spreadsheets with bizarre filename extensions.

Nonetheless, existing subtitle files are now a way of life for many subtitling suppliers and, again, the subtitling facility cannot begin work on a project until these have been delivered. Most reasonable studios and distributors will trust their subtitling facility to quality-control existing files before agreeing to re-version them for DVD (the alternative being to originate the translation themselves).

In the end, it’s a case of only getting what you pay for and if the distributor has a limited budget, they’ll often put up with poor-quality existing subtitles rather than pay for a new translation on the basis that if it’s been released once like that, it can be released again.

As well as not being in the true spirit of DVD, this approach also misses the point that – if indeed every film is a foreign film to someone, then is it not commercial suicide to release a DVD with subtitles that are so bad, they alienate all your foreign audiences?

MANAGING SUBTITLING

OK, so your subtitling facility has got its video, QC’d any supplied subtitling files and gladly accepted any existing post-production scripts.

If the distributor is asking the subtitling facility to supply a number of language streams for the DVD, the first thing the subtitlers will do is probably create a “master file”. This is also known as a “genesis file” or “template” or “spotting list” or any combination of the above.

In a nutshell, this is a consecutive list of subtitles in the original (source) language of the video item, carefully timed to match the dialogue track and edited down for speed. The master file is an almost completely new concept, invented specifically for the purposes of DVD.

Yes, we always had CCSLs to guide us as to where a subtitle should begin and end in feet and frames, and what to put in it, but these were often as not seen as a guideline rather than an imposed template. If there’s one thing that translators complain about more than anything else, it’s having to work to the master file.

Practically, however, it’s the only way the subtitling facility can efficiently control consistency from one language to another, and this is especially true when dealing with DVDs that may require upwards of 20 subtitle streams. Even the re-versioned existing files are often “merged” into the master files to ensure that something that’s subtitled in one language is also subtitled in another.

'FORCED' SUBTITLES

The biggest cause of inconsistency from one language to another is the use (or not) of “forced” subtitles. At this point, you’re going to have to concentrate very hard because this is a difficult concept to grasp.

Forced subtitles are subtitles that will appear on screen regardless of whether the DVD user has chosen the subtitle stream. Imagine you’re French, and you’ve decided to watch your latest Hollywood blockbuster in the original English with French subtitles. You’d expect not only the dialogue to be translated but also any words that appear on-screen but don’t feature in the English dialogue.

For example, I remember subtitling several movies featuring a certain dinner-jacketed spy that were peppered with place names and times, for example “Somewhere in the Ukraine, 10am Sunday”. Being French, I don’t understand this, so I’d expect to see this bit of information translated. As I’m watching the movie in the English, there it is as a part of the subtitles translating the dialogue in the movie itself.

However, if I’m watching the movie with the French dubbed soundtrack, I still need to have my “Somewhere in the Ukraine” translated. So the subtitling company will – generally – provide a second subtitle stream that contains just these captions, or forced subtitles. The tricky part is that not every language that’s being subtitled requires a forced stream – remember that the subtitling facility only needs to provide forced streams for dubbed versions.

And the even trickier part is that the subtitling facility can’t rely on one forced language stream applying to another: the French version may need a forced subtitle for “Ukraine”, but there’s a possibility the German dub actually includes a narrator who voices that particular part. And you won’t know that unless you’ve got the German dub too…

ON-SCREEN POSITIONING

Perhaps another of the most contentious areas of subtitling is the issue of on-screen positioning. Given the seemingly unending combination of possible DVD player and TV set-ups, coupled with differing types of original aspect ratios, subtitles generally have to have a “one size fits all” approach to on-screen positioning.

Your subtitling facility should have enough experience in the business to know that its subtitles need to be within safe area and that if you’ve got a 2.35:1 aspect ratio on your product, they’ll stick one line in picture and one in the black. Unless it’s a non-anamorphic letterbox… Beyond that, we get into all sorts of arguments about the artistry of subtitle positioning.

The best advice I could give anyone dealing with subtitles is to let your subtitling facility dictate where they place your subtitles. You’re more likely to get a good-quality product that way than if you start making specific demands on how many pixels should cross lines and so on…

HOW LONG THE JOB TAKES

What about production times? I remember once having to bite my tongue in a meeting with a potential client about turnaround times for a multi-language stream DVD project. “It shouldn’t take much longer than the running time of the film to do, should it? I mean, interpreters translate in the time it takes to say something.”

Answering the question of how long it takes to translate a film is like saying how long a piece of string is. Generally, subtitling companies work out their timescales thus: 10 days to organise a job and get the English master file together, 10 days to get the translations completed and returned, and another 10 days to proof-read, collate and create the tif files required for DVD.

Subtitling facilities will always try and accommodate clients’ requests but if someone putting together a DVD project realises the above, we can only hope that it’s not a huge effort to plan plenty of time to turn the subtitling around.

Then there’s the thorny issue of DVD-R QCs. In the days of relatively good lead-times and a small but steady flow of films going onto DVD, one certain subtitling facility came up with the not-so-brilliant idea of getting the authoring house to create no-frills DVD-Rs of pre-DLT product with the subtitle streams present for the subtitling facility to quality control.

By so doing, they opened up a huge can of worms. The authoring houses found they couldn’t predict how long it’d take them to get a final go-ahead from the subtitling facility re-checking work they should’ve checked in the first place, the subtitling facilities stumbled across silly mistakes they wanted to change, incurring a complete re-supply of subtitle streams and the clients found themselves being charged extra by the authoring houses for re-importing streams and running off countless DVD-Rs.

Make no mistake about it, DVD-R QCs are, in my humble opinion, totally bleeding pointless. If the subtitling facility is worth its salt, it’ll have checked for spelling and grammar before supplying to the authoring house and we all should know enough about what we’re doing now not to supply the wrong stream for the wrong movie.

Add to this the fact that most authoring houses perform subtitle spot-checks as part of their own QC procedures and DVD-R QC is a procedure that should soon be history.

SUBTITLING HAS COME A LONG WAY

As you’ll hopefully have gathered from the above, subtitling has come a long way since the early days of DVD. It is now relatively simple for a distributor or authoring house to find a professional subtitling company who they can rely on to provide good-quality subtitles and who have the relevant DVD experience to avoid everyone having to re-invent the wheel.

However, certain concerns have begun to emerge as the DVD market generally and DVD subtitling particularly is reaching maturity.

First is the increasing pressure on price. Authoring houses have already seen this happen with authoring costs. While it’s inevitable that increased volume of work necessarily forces pricing downwards, subtitling prices have been pushed down to a level where many good professional translators no longer accept to work in the industry generally, and some of the more aggressive subtitling facilities content themselves with the services of college leavers, turning translations of major film and TV product round in days or hours.

Subtitling is a costly business and, while current prices from independent subtitling facilities are now nearly half what they were 5 years ago, there’s not much more room for reduction.

Secondly, the professional, independent subtitling facility with a staff of seasoned industry professionals has become something of a rarity in recent months. Without wishing to cast any doubt on their ability to subtitle, the fact that many former subtitling companies have now been swallowed up into the machinery of multinational authoring-compression-subtitling-replication-logistics conglomerates seems a bit of a shame.

In any case, it’s been a hell of a journey for subtitling professionals generally. Subtitling is a fascinating (to some, anyway!) and essential part of the DVD production process and, like so many elements of that chain, should not be taken for granted.

If every film is a foreign film to someone, then subtitles are every film distributor’s way of bringing them closer to the action and involving them in their product.


James Gardner is Operations Director at IMS Group plc in London, a leading independent producer of “access services” for DVD, TV and new media. He has managed hundreds of subtitle projects for DVDs for all the major studios and distributors since the early days of DVD. james.gardner@ims-media.com
...

Article Comments

comments powered by Disqus