In the past year, the managers of the North American operation have eliminated both peer reviews and self-reviews, and have eliminated the system which ensured that a wide variety of work is reviewed. In the long-established UK wing of the operation, subtitlers are reviewed three times a month: once by themselves, once by a peer, and once by support staff. They contend that workers will “adapt” to the new requirements, never mind that even experienced subtitlers often struggle to complete the barest minimum of prep work.Īt Red Bee Media / Ericsson, the main established quality-control measure for ensuring accuracy of live subtitles is detailed reviews of subtitlers’ work. Management has repeatedly ignored requests from captioning and training staff to increase allotted prep time on certain live programmes. In the past year, the preparation time allotted for live-subtitled programmes has been almost unilaterally cut in half. Subtitlers are often provided with copy that is rife with typos and spelling mistakes, or which contains bizarre formatting that must be meticulously stripped out in order to create captions that conform to regulator guidelines and client house styles. In the process of preparing to caption a programme live, every minute is precious. When it comes to subtitling pre-recorded programmes, there has been a similar scaling back of proofreading over the years. Attempts to correct errors on the fly are often thwarted by technical issues. The result is that the same errors transmit over and over again. In previous years at Red Bee Media / Ericsson, when text was to be re-transmitted in this way, it would be proofread after the first transmission, ensuring that all subsequent transmissions would have near-perfect accuracy.
“live respeaking”), they may be produced based on prepared text provided by the broadcaster, or (in the case of repeated content) they might be re-transmissions of text which has already been created. Live subtitles may be created from scratch by subtitlers (i.e.
#Subtitler salary software#
Subtitlers must make editorial decision on the fly, and voice recognition software can be a fickle friend. Before I discuss this infrastructure, it’s important to understand that with respect to accuracy, live subtitling is an especially imperfect process. In the course of creating subtitles and performing associated administrative duties, subtitlers are regularly confronted by the skeletal remains of now-defunct quality control infrastructure.
The cutbacks are especially pronounced in the North American offices in Montréal, QC and Duluth, GA, which are new to the operation and which management has established will be the main target for cost-saving in the global operation. This necessarily results in a poorer quality of subtitles. The logic goes that any labour spent reviewing, proofreading, and improving our work could be more “productively” deployed in the production of a greater quantity of subtitles. One might expect that this kind of pride in providing a high-quality service to hearing-impaired viewers would be shared and even encouraged by the operation’s management, but instead, I have observed the repeated slashing of quality control measures in the interest of increasing profitability. In my time as a subtitler with Red Bee Media / Ericsson’s Access Services department, I have come to develop an eagerness to produce high-quality captions for all audiences, regardless of the content or the network it broadcasts on.
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