Translation in the Entertainment and Media Industry

Binge-watching series’ on your couch and listening to K-pop on a loop may well be your favorite past times. But that’s not all that is there to it. Did you know that the entertainment industry is a global giant, whose influence transcends all borders, like no other?

The global entertainment industry is a $2 trillion economy that includes films, music, gaming, multimedia content, visual effects(VFX), television, and print among several others.

India has the world’s fifth largest market for the entertainment and media industry. The Indian industry is projected to reach $34 billion by 2022.

With the internet offering possibilities for multimedia content transactions to take place across the world, the entertainment industry is expanding like never before. And so is the relevance of entertainment and media translation.

Why do we need Entertainment and Media Translation?

The increasing digitalization of content has ensured global reach with ease for companies in the entertainment industry. Content is become increasingly fluid across borders – both intra-country and inter-country.

While the US continues to have the largest entertainment industry with viewership across the world, several other countries are also trying to fit into the race of expanding themselves to a non-native audience. India, with its regional diversity and huge viewership, is one among them.

Reaching out to this huge non-native audience can be done in two ways. One is to simultaneously produce the same content in other languages. Bilingual movies are an example of this. However such initiatives pose huge logistical and economic constraints.

Thus the only viable alternative to make use of this newfound global market is through translation. The demand for translation and content localization services has been booming in the entertainment industry in recent times.

Subtitling, voice-overs, and dubbing have been some of the most popular forms of entertainment translation. Besides improving the reach of content, subtitling has taken on a new dimension of perceived quality.

Having well-drafted subtitles is often considered as a marker of the quality of the content. Similarly, high-quality voice-overs that are culturally compatible make the content reliable, appealing, and authentic.

OTT Platforms and Translation

If you think about it, the translation industry has been crucial to your Netflix and Chill! From watching the whole of Money Heist in Spanish to exploring your newfound interest in Malayalam movies, subtitles have been the one key element of your entertainment experience.

In 2017, for the first time, OTT giant Netflix’s international subscribers surpassed their domestic subscriber count in the US. This was the result of a carefully curated strategy at localization of content.

Popular OTT platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime now provide subtitles and audio content in as many as 20 languages.

In India, the demography of OTT users has also undergone significant changes in the past few years. There are more rural non-English speaking users in India than others. This has in turn spurred the demand for regional content.

While the pandemic has generally caused economies to slump, OTT platforms received a major push during the lockdown in terms of viewership. As people binge-watched throughout the lockdown, OTT platforms looked for new ways to expand their target audience through translation and localization.

The Accessibility Angle

Subtitles and closed captions not only improve the viewership of the content among non-native audiences. They are also extremely essential tools for improving accessibility among the hearing impaired.

Closed captions, which are mostly the norm in OTT platforms are inherently different from subtitles.

Closed captions will include textual descriptions of sounds- be it the background noise, the doorbell ringing, or birds chirping. These textual descriptions are intended for the hearing impaired.

On the other hand, subtitles do not include descriptions of abstract sounds. They are targeted only at those who do not understand a particular language.

Are native speakers also using subtitles?

Interestingly, non-native speakers are not the only ones relying on video subtitles. Native speakers are increasingly reporting that they prefer to watch content with subtitles on, even though they can completely comprehend the language.

Several users say that turning on subtitles helps them to multitask. Research studies show that many of the users watch content while commuting or doing other routine tasks.

Most of them prefer to keep their audio low so as to prevent any blaring sounds from their device catching others around them off guard. They instead switch on subtitles to compensate.

Entertainment translation needs to be done right!

Given the increasing demand for translation in the entertainment industry, there is no dispute to the fact that translation has to get things right.

Nobody will forget the cringe-worthy Hindi version of Jurassic Park that destroyed the fun of the movie (or rather made it funny!). South Indian movies that were regularly dubbed into Hindi were given bizarre titles that made no sense at all.

Bollywood dialogues when literally translated and given subtitles in English have given off too many inappropriate meanings that raised all the brows!

Entertainment and media translation thus deserves a huge investment in terms of its quality. With its increasing popularity and relevance, translation is all set to become one of the key driving forces of the future of entertainment.