Kinda my dream job haha 😭
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 for how English speakers speak. Nothing wrong with changing the dialog to have it for 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
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.
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
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.
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
Transcripting is a job, but not likely for shows as they can just pull text from the scripts.
The script doesn’t always perfectly reflect what was actually said though.
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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.
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/
Nah it’s all algorithms now I’m sorry :(
Not an open-ended thought provoking question. Locking.
