“I can’t listen without my subtitles”: how the text on the screen went from rejection to hegemony | Culture

The definitive leap of faith came in the 2020 awards season. “Once they overcome that great barrier that is the inch width of the subtitles, they will be able to enjoy incredible films,” defended the winner of the Palme d’Or in Cannes, the director Bong Joon-ho, when collecting his Golden Globe for best foreign film for Parasites. A few weeks later, the filmmaker would make history in Hollywood by getting a film shot in Korean to win two of the most coveted Oscars (film and direction, as well as foreign film and original screenplay). The gala that most influences the film box office confirmed that that “width barrier” on our screens had been officially torn down. And beyond certifying the soft power Korean, the power of the subtitle became mainstream that same night, overcoming the cliché that associated him with auteur cinema fundamentalists. There it was confirmed what the text integrated into our screens is today: an indispensable tool in cultural and social consumption.

That the subtitles were worthy of reigning at the Oscars did not come as a surprise to the twenty- and thirty-somethings of our time. Your routine basically doesn’t work without them. From the silenced news clips they watch in the dead moments on the bus, the reels (short videos) from the accounts suggested by their algorithm on networks or the subtitled series (even in their native language) that they watch from their room at low volume so as not to disturb their family or roommates. All your audiovisual consumption goes through them. Even Google and Apple know this, as they have improved their subtitling system, while TikTok and Instagram have perfected the tool that allows subtitle our own audio clips. There is no escape: the subtitle has gone from rejection to absolute hegemony in everyday life.

confirmed it a 2022 study of the app Preply languageswhich revealed that seven out of ten young people between 18 and 25 years old consume absolutely everything with subtitles and five out of ten millennials only watch clips if they have integrated texts. Half of them also access this type of content in public spaces and outside the home. The ubiquity of the word superimposed on the screen is so evident that it even stars in memes, the minimal unit of viral communication that started it all in this new voracious consumption of integrated text and image. One of Twitter’s favorites, due to its successful recurrence, is that visual metaphor in which Velma is seen Scooby Doo fumbling for his glasses in a dark room while saying to himself: “My subtitles, I can’t listen without my subtitles…”. Who hasn’t ever felt like her.

Precariousness and monopoly

Who is hiding behind this invasion? A legion of translators. The work of a subtitler goes beyond mere literal translation. In order to fit them on the screen and for the brain to be able to cognitively process them without having to reread them, the subtitle must have a limit of 17 characters per line per second (this is the limit that Netflix recommends, although 15 is ideal) and they cannot spend more than five seconds nor less than one second on the screen. The times also change depending on whether the content is for adults (reads faster) or children (slower). Strategies that have had to adapt to a new era of productivity in the sector never seen before.

If a decade ago the subtitles market was basically limited to home editions of DVD and Blu-Ray, subtitles for the deaf on television, original version film libraries and cinemas or pirated websites – it was the golden age of fansubs (or fan subtitles), when series like Lost turned into stars of the network those who posted the translations within minutes of the broadcast of the series in the United States—the arrival of the platforms of streaming has triggered a business that has not benefited the professionals of the union.

“We need a collective agreement. Not only have they drastically lowered rates and prevented us from talking or negotiating openly about them due to competition law, delivery times have also been reduced. Now they can require us to translate a film in just three days,” they say from the Association of Audiovisual Translation and Adaptation of Spain (ATRAE).

As professionals explain, the emergence of three large intermediaries that monopolize the subtitle service for the platforms has been key in the degradation of the union’s conditions. “They have non-negotiable fixed rates and they are not exactly decent. If you don’t go through the hoop, someone else will come along who does. This works like this. It doesn’t matter if you have started translating a series, if the client does not want to pay your fee, they will give the series to another translator. They rarely look for the good of the product,” laments Begoña Ballester-Olmos, director of BBO, an agency boutique who has been in charge of translating films like Alcarràs, As Bestas either Bergman Island and series like Friends. In contrast, he says, there is the case of end clients, “production companies, distributors and communication agencies who pay much better and this is reflected in the quality of the subtitles. They know how important their product is and they take care of it. As it should be,” he adds.

The landing of AI as a machine translation tool among these giant intermediaries, as well as the outsourcing of translators amateurs at low prices and offshored, is leading to a degradation and flattening of the audiovisual cognitive experience. Professionals regret that cases such as the scandal of the mediocre subtitling of The squid game can be repeated more frequently. “Sometimes, people believe that they have not connected with a series or a movie and they may not realize it, but on many occasions it has been because the subtitling was not well advised,” says the translator known on Twitter as @Follaldre. This Spaniard living in London, translator of films like La La Land and with more than two decades of experience in the sector, denounces that Deluxe, one of these intermediary agencies that monopolize the business and offers subtitles to platforms such as Netflix, Prime Video or Disney, “is offering rates of three dollars per translated minute, about 60 per episode sitcom”. A budget that, as he clarifies, “any professional with experience in the sector would reject on a basic basis.”

From omnipresence to decontextualization

The subtitle invasion not only affects the corporate or audiovisual business. The projected text has also assaulted the performing arts. “In postmodern theater everyone has been using it for a few years,” confirms the playwright Cris Blancowho feels authentic devotion to breaking the fourth wall with the viewer and in his latest work has decided to take a step further in the face of this standardization of the projected text. Although it could not be seen in the recent performances at Conde Duque de Madrid (“I want to work on it specifically in another work,” he says), when he presented Grandissima Illusione at the 2022 Grec festival decided that, at one point during the performance, the subtitle of the play would come to life and rebel against what was happening on stage as an autonomous entity, something like Hal at the end of 2001: A Space Odysseybut in a much more absurd and hilarious way. “I am fascinated by the asides of theater. I find that moment very funny when one speaks to the public, as if from another dimension, and breaks everything. I needed to update that magical moment and for the subtitle itself to say: ‘I’m fed up, I can’t take it anymore,'” adds the also professor at the Institut del Teatre de Barcelona.

Others who play with the text on the screen to decontextualize it are Cris Celada and Tomás Castro, members of Reading is Sexya project in which they remix images of pop divas with philosophical speeches. In their clips, like the one they developed in an action for the Matadero in Madrid, they make Beyoncé tells (with subtitles) a text by Angela Davis or they get Miley Cyrus explains Virginia Woolf’s own room. “We like to confuse, we love subtitles as a tool to give another type of use to the text and give it prominence,” explains Celada, who also sees “absolutely everything” in a subtitled version. Another one, and they are legion, among the addicts in this new paradigm in which it seems that, like that Velma from the persecution meme, we are no longer able to listen to anything without having our subtitles nearby.