Subtitle Room, Twenty-Four Hours to Deadline

By 杏仁豆腐

Four characters per second is all the screen can hold. A third of the original will be thrown away, without fail.

What to throw away and what to keep. Deciding that is your job, and from the moment you decide, it is a job that earns you someone's resentment.

Setting: Tsurushiro, Ginsen Subtitles Ltd. | twenty-four hours to the first-print screening

🎬 The Second Floor of Ginsen Subtitles

On the second floor of a mixed-use building in a shopping street along a private rail line sits a small company of four employees, Ginsen Subtitles Ltd. It produces subtitles for a dozen or so theatrical releases a year. This job is a feature set on a Nordic island, Stone and Salt, running time one hundred eighteen minutes, one thousand three hundred twenty subtitle cards. The first-print screening is tomorrow at four in the afternoon, and from there, with corrections, there is less than a day to delivery. The work is done in the subtitling software Kasumi: two lines at the bottom of the screen, up to thirteen characters a line, displayed for at least two seconds. However long the original, however fast the actor talks, this frame does not stretch.

The One Who Cuts, and the One Who Counts

Muro Ryoko: A veteran subtitle translator with thirty-two years in the trade. Fast-talking and acerbic, long on analogies; when her translation gets cut she is genuinely angry for exactly thirty seconds, then offers three alternatives of her own. She carries thirty years' worth of her mentor's pet sayings.

Isaji Akari: A checker, eight months into the job. Having majored in the source language at university, she is the first to notice information dropped from a translation. She always confirms seconds and character counts out loud, and when she gets nervous her politeness stacks up two layers deep.

What You Decide

You are the subtitle director on this job. You set the cues, split the lines, fit the script to the timing, and take responsibility down to the last card. The line "Not enough salt to last the winter" has a timing of just two point one seconds. Only eight characters fit. Keep the salt, or keep the winter? Muro argues for the former; Isaji brings up the word order of the original. The only instruction from the director is "keep this scene's subtitle to a single card." The clock moves on, and the screening room booking cannot be changed. The director has sent word that he will attend the screening. Whether to cut a translation, or to decide not to cut it and trim somewhere else instead, is in the end this seat's call. The one who got cut moves on to the next card unconvinced. One thousand three hundred twenty cards in twenty-four hours; the trimming war has already begun.