Kinda my dream job haha 😭
Not an open-ended thought provoking question. Locking.
I’ve thought about how fun it would be to have that job, but then i remembered that i can only understand half of what’s said which is why i have the subtitles on, so i wouldn’t be very good at it.
This is pretty much entirely automated these days. If you’ve watched anything streaming with subtitles lately you’ll see nobody seems to even care if the subtitles are accurate or correct anymore either, I wish they would hire people to at least proof read them lol
That explains the shitty translations for Korean movies. If one loses context for a while the transcripts would mislead even more
99 percent invisible did an episode about subtitles a while back. It’s mostly automated now but human transcriptions tend to be better.
Here is the episode: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/craptions/
I don’t mean to pop anyone’s bubble but… this is almost likely not going to be a job for any amount of time. YouTube already has relatively good automated subtitling and I believe show transcriptions are mostly just done by dropping in the script and marking out timings. If this is a job I can’t imagine the field has very many positions and it’s probably done by editors during the editing process as a side effect.
I do wish they would hire a human to give everything, at least, a quick once over. When the words don’t match the subs, it throws me off a bit…
On services like YouTube those auto generated subtitles can be overridden - for TV shows I’m sure they usually pass in front of someone’s eyes - I’m just not sure if anyone has a full time job doing that.
The ones I’m thinking of are usually live action dubs of non-English shows. It’s like the subtitles are a faithful translation of the source, where as the dialog seems more localized to better fit how English speakers speak. Nothing wrong with changing the dialog to have it fit better for other languages, but at least use that localized version of the script for your subtitles.
Some of the less mainstream anime does this too, but I’m not a big anime fan, so most of what I consume is the big stuff, Attack on Titan, Ghost in the Shell, Fullmetal
Edit: grammar correct thinks it’s smarter than it is
Oh my God, I HATE it when they use the dub script for the subtitles on anime. It’s fine if they want to offer it as a separate subtitle stream as closed captions for the hearing impaired, but when I’m watching something in the original language I expect the subtitles to be faithful to what they are actually saying, and I want the timing to actually match. It’s incredibly frustrating when the lines don’t actually match up with the sound of the dialogue, and then you realize it’s a “dubtitle” script.
I mostly agree - but with phrasing exceptions around idioms and the like… I don’t want to read “The climb was as rusty as a grandfather’s sword.” I’d prefer to read a less literal translation that captures the same meaning unless there’s specific value to that phrasing that carries additional meaning in the context.
Transcripting is a job, but not likely for shows as they can just pull text from the scripts.
While what you’re saying is true, getting the raw text is only a tiny part of the job. More importantly, for good subtitles you need to:
- account for bits where the actors and editors have deviated from the script
- decide if lines need to be shortened (reading is sometimes slower than listening)
- decide if long sentences need to be split into multiple subtitle lines (so not too much text is on screen at the same time and information isn’t given too much ahead of what’s happening on screen)
- decide if background conversations, music and sound should appear in subtitles
- get the timing right (everyone who has subtitled even a short youtube video knows how much work that can be)
- probably more
I haven’t worked in the industry myself so I don’t know how these tasks are distributed between multiple people but I think you get the point.
I agree that this is a really important job. The wife and I usually enable subtitles on English content (our first language) any time accents are involved. Watched Shakespeare & Hathaway on BritBox recently and the English subs were glorious. They used a different background color for each character which I found extremely helpful, and the accuracy was quite good.
Sadly this is not universally true for Britbox content. Hartnell-era Doctor Who seems to be based on the scripts as it occasionally deviates significantly from the lines as delivered.
Father Brown is sort of middling and appears to be auto-generated in that the subs are mostly right but any errors are obviously homophonic and would have been caught with human review.
My concern (with this being a viable stand alone job at least) is that, even if this is a rare case where it makes sense to pay someone to transcribe these, whoever is editing this is basically working with all the information and skills relevant (except maybe making context based modifications to subtitles to be more concise or expressive) so it’d be a tough sell to hire someone else to read and comprehend the script and go through every moment of a video after the editing pass just to capture dialog.
The script doesn’t always perfectly reflect what was actually said though.
I’m going to guess that’s one of the first jobs that was given away to AI.
This is a mostly automated job now, TV editing staff might give the output a once over, but that’s just going to be one small part of their editing job.
If you can type quicker than people speak, there’s still a handful of dedicated human roles in important news or political broadcasting where you absolutely can’t have a mistake in the transcription.
And it shows. Especially for YouTube but even some shows are bad
Nah it’s all algorithms now I’m sorry :(
There are services like 3playmedia, GoTranscript, Verbit.ai. But these jobs pay pennies in comparison to how much time it takes. It’s something to do in addition to a full-time job, not something you can make a living doing.
Just a reminder that even if the core work of the transcribing is done automatically now, being a media accessibility specialist who ensures the transcribing works and it is attached correctly, performs advocacy work for accessibility, and manages these systems, is a worthwhile job and will stay so for a long time.
