The final leap of faith came in the 2020 awards season. "Once they get over that big barrier that is the inch width of the subtitles, they will be able to enjoy incredible movies," defended the winner of the Palme d'Or in Cannes, the director Bong Joon-ho, when picking up his Golden Globe for best foreign film for
parasites
.
A few weeks later, the filmmaker would make Hollywood history by winning two of the most coveted Oscars for a film shot in Korean (film and directing, as well as foreign film and original screenplay).
The gala that most influences the film box office confirmed that this "width barrier" on our screens had been officially demolished.
And beyond certifying Korean
soft power
, the power of the subtitle became
mainstream
that same night, overcoming the cliché that associated it with fundamentalists of auteur cinema.
There, it was confirmed what the text integrated into our screens is today: an indispensable tool in cultural and social consumption.
Here is Bong Joon-ho's acceptance speech for Parasite, winner of Best Motion Picture, Foreign Language at The #GoldenGlobes.
pic.twitter.com/5C1vdsS6A4
— NBC Entertainment (@nbc) January 6, 2020
That subtitles were worthy of reigning supreme at the Oscars did not come as a surprise to the twenty- and thirty-somethings of our time.
Your routine basically doesn't work without them.
From the muted news clips that watch in the dead moments of the bus, the
reels
(short videos) from the accounts suggested by their algorithm on networks or the subtitled series (even in their mother tongue) that they watch from their room at a low volume so as not to disturb their family or roommates.
All their audiovisual consumption goes through them.
Even Google and Apple know this, which have improved their subtitling system, while TikTok and Instagram have perfected the tool that allows us to subtitle our own audio clips.
There is no escape: the subtitle has gone from rejection to absolute hegemony on a day-to-day basis.
This was confirmed by a 2022 study by the language
app
Preply, which revealed that seven out of ten young people between the ages of 18 and 25 consume absolutely all subtitles and five out of ten millennials only watch clips if they have integrated texts.
Half of them also access this type of content in public spaces and outside the home.
The ubiquity of the superimposed word on the screen is so evident that it even stars in memes, the minimal unit of viral communication that started it all in this new voracious consumption of integrated text and image.
One of Twitter's favorites, due to its successful recurrence, is that visual metaphor in which Velma from
Scooby Doo is seen.
fumbling for her glasses in a dark room while saying to herself: “My subtitles, I can't listen without my subtitles…”.
Who has not ever felt like her.
precariousness and monopoly
Who is behind this invasion?
A legion of translators.
The work of a subtitler goes beyond the mere literal translation.
In order to fit them on the screen and for the brain to be able to cognitively process them without having to reread them, the subtitle must have a limit of 17 characters per line and second (this is the maximum recommended by Netflix, although 15 are ideal) and they cannot be more than five seconds or less than one second on the screen.
The times also change depending on whether the content is for adults (read faster) or children (slower).
Strategies that have had to adapt to a new era of productivity in the sector never seen before.
If a decade ago the subtitles market was basically limited to home editions of DVDs and Blu-Ray, subtitles for the deaf on television, film libraries and cinemas of the original version or pirate websites —it was the golden age of
fansubs
(or fan subtitles), when series like
Lost
turned those who uploaded the translations into network stars within minutes of the series' broadcast in the United States—, the arrival of
streaming
platforms has triggered a business that it has not benefited the professionals of the trade.
“We need a collective agreement.
Not only have rates dropped drastically and prevent us from talking or negotiating openly about them due to competition law, delivery times have also been reduced.
Now they can require us to translate a film in just three days”, they say from the Spanish Audiovisual Translation and Adaptation Association (ATRAE).
On Netflix, subtitles should not exceed 17 characters per line.
Nor can they be more than five seconds on the screen.
According to the professionals, the irruption of three large intermediaries that monopolize the subtitle service for the platforms has been key in the degradation of the union's conditions.
“They have non-negotiable fixed rates and they are not exactly decent.
If you don't go through the hoop, another one will come.
This works like this.
It doesn't matter if you have started translating a series, if the client does not want to pay your fee, he will give the series to another translator.
They rarely look for the good of the product”, laments Begoña Ballester-Olmos, director of BBO, a
boutique
agency that has been in charge of translating films like
Alcarràs, As Bestas
or
La isla de Bergman
and series like
Friends
.
In contrast, he says, there is the case of end customers, “producers, distributors and communication agencies that pay much better and this is reflected in the quality of the subtitles.
They know how important their product is and they take care of it.
As it should be," he adds.
The arrival of AI as a machine translation tool among these giant intermediaries, as well as the subcontracting of
amateur
translators at low prices and relocated, is leading to a degradation and flattening of the audiovisual cognitive experience.
Professionals lament that cases such as the scandal of the mediocre subtitling of
El juego del squid
can be repeated more frequently.
"Sometimes, people believe that they have not connected with a series or a movie and they may not realize it, but on many occasions it has been because the subtitling was not well advised," says the translator known on Twitter as @Follaldre.
This Spaniard living in London, translator of films like
La La Land
and with more than two decades of experience in the sector, denounces that Deluxe, one of these intermediary agencies that monopolize the business and offer subtitles to platforms such as Netflix, Prime Video or Disney, "is offering rates of three dollars per translated minute, about 60 per
sitcom
episode ”.
A budget that, according to him clarifies, "any professional with experience in the sector would reject as a base".
From omnipresence to decontextualization
The invasion of the subtitle not only affects the corporate or audiovisual business.
The projected text has also taken the performing arts by storm.
"Everyone has used it in postmodern theater for a few years," confirms playwright Cris Blanco, who feels a true devotion to breaking the fourth wall with the viewer and in her latest work has decided to go a step further in the face of this standardization of projected text.
Although she has not been able to see herself in recent performances at Conde Duque de Madrid (“I want to work on it specifically in another work,” she says), when she presented
Grandissima Illusione
At the Grec festival in 2022, he decided that, at one point in the performance, the subtitle of the work would come to life and rebel against what was happening on stage as an autonomous entity, something like Hal at the end of
2001: An Odyssey. in space
, but in a much more absurd and hilarious way.
“I am fascinated by the asides of the theater.
I am very amused by that moment when one speaks to the public, as if from another dimension, and it breaks everything.
I needed to update that magical moment and for the subtitle itself to say: 'I'm fed up, I can't take it anymore'”, adds the also professor at the Institut del Teatre de Barcelona.
Others who play with the text on the screen to decontextualize it are Cris Celada and Tomás Castro, members of Leer es Sexy, a project in which they remix images of pop divas with philosophical discourses.
In their clips, like the one they developed in an action for the Matadero in Madrid, they make Beyoncé relate (with subtitles) a text by Angela Davis or get Miley Cyrus to explain Virginia Woolf's own room.
"We like to confuse, we love subtitles as a tool to give the text another type of use and to gain prominence," explains Celada, who also sees "absolutely everything" in a subtitled version.
Another one, and they are legion, among the addicts in this new paradigm in which it seems that, like that Velma of the persecution meme, we are no longer capable of listening to anything without having our subtitles nearby.
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