Over the years of work, I have noticed an alarming trend — many otherwise capable subtitlers will often follow their client’s guidelines too strictly, almost dogmatically, without a real understanding of why those guidelines are the way they are and not knowing when to deviate from them to ensure the audience’s viewing comfort. This leads to countless subtitling errors, because no matter how robust and well-thought-out a style guide is, there will always be gaps in it, and so there’ll be moments when you need to make a judgement call based on your expertise rather than a written prescription.
In this new article series, I’d like to stress the importance of a thoughtful, intelligent approach to subtitling and to highlight some of those gaps, starting with arguably the biggest one.
At the same time, when given creative freedom, the most skilled and experienced subtitlers don't obsess over that number as much everyone else seems to believe, because they know just how unreliable it can be, for multiple reasons.
First of all, as I wrote in one of my previous articles, CPS and WPM consider only the volume of subtitle text but not its other properties, such as complexity or format. Unfamiliar words, tricky syntax, puzzling dialogue, italics and some other things will slow down your reading, and these two metrics simply do not reflect that.
Max Deryagin’s Subtitling Studio
Film Subtitling And Game Subtitling:
What's The Difference?
As far as I'm aware, subtitling research dates back to 1957, when Simon Laks released his pioneering work Le Sous-titrage de films: Sa technique, son esthétique. Since then, this academic field has seen a massive increase in popularity and acknowledgement as a separate branch of translation studies that explores various aspects of subtitling audiovisual products.
One of the relatively novel types of such products is video games. Enjoyed worldwide, they play a prominent role in today's popular culture and society. Just like other forms of multimedia, games are subtitled for the benefit of the deaf and hard of hearing as well as those not fluent in the game's primary language.
Yet, video game subtitling remains woefully underresearched — so much so, in fact, that I could only find several related papers.
This article's purpose is to call academics' attention to the medium and stimulate more research by outlining the fundamental differences between film and games in terms of subtitling.
So, here they are:
1. Game subtitling is multimodal
Cutscenes + gameplay + menu (?) = multimodal (and different modes require different approaches)
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus
Star Wars Battlefront II
2. Games are interactive
games are interactive, so less time for subs
3. Games can offer controlled presentation rate
Some games have text in bubbles = let you control the presentation rate
4. Stronger space constraints
the interface is there, so can't obscure it
5. There's no timecoding
Subtitles appear not at a predetermined time in gameplay. Audio files are played separately, so the process is very different (ask Ian Hamilton)
6. Game subtitle translation is not audiovisual
The translators don't get to see the game, let alone play it
7. More creative liberty
what remained of edith finch blah blah
8. Completely different technology
Subtitles displayed on event triggers rather than timecodes, generated by the game engine.