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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
The script doesn’t always perfectly reflect what was actually said though.