I was first exposed to subtitling during the second semester of my first year at MIIS. The Spanish Translation and Interpretation Program was fortunate enough to have Iván Villanueva Jordán, a professor at the Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas, as a guest lecturer; Iván is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in audiovisual translation. During our month-long subtitling workshop, he taught us how to think as A/V translators and introduced us to the common problems that they face: quick and/or dense dialogue, text on screen and shot changes, among others. His workshop reinforced the notion that translation—no matter the medium—is a compromise.

He also got me thinking: what kind of work exists for budding A/V translators that work from Spanish into English? Over coffee, he explained that most projects that I would acquire would be institutional in nature: training videos for medical devices, PR for Latin American NGOs. In short, there is not much work in the way of subtitling blockbusters from Spanish into English because, well, that’s not typically the direction that popular culture flows.

That’s why I chose to subtitle a drum lesson that I found on Gilberto Finol’s YouTube channel, leccionesdebateria (drumlessons). I wanted to combine my knowledge and passion as a drummer with my translation skills. When I first watched the video, the term granadero caught my attention. Finol used it when referring to the floor tom, the drum with the lowest frequency apart from the kickdrum. When I did a quick Google search, I found many listings for drum equipment on Venezuelan e-commerce sites and thought the he had to be Venezuelan. My suspicions were confirmed when I found Finol’s profile on last.fm. When I learned that he is currently based in Spain, I had even more reason to subtitle his work. I live in Madrid and hope to break into the A/V translation market, specifically in the entertainment industry.

The only real challenges that this video posed stemmed from Finol’s natural speaking style as well as the demands of subtitling speech that is closely linked to sound. I referred to the Netflix Timed Text Style Guides (the General, English and Spanish pages) when transcribing, spotting and subsequently translating the subtitles for the video. A few key similarities and differences across languages immediately stood out and informed my QA processes in Visual Sub Sync Enhanced (VSS) for both the Spanish and English subtitles. First, according to Netflix, the minimum time that a subtitle can be on-screen is 5/6 sec or roughly 833 ms and the maximum is 7 sec or 7000 ms; the maximum character limit per line is 42. Netflix imposes a limit of 2 lines of center-justified text per subtitle. When I first created my project in VSS, I entered these specifications in the Subtitle and Error checking tabs of the Preferences pane (Edit>Preferences>Subtitle & Edit>Preferences>Error checking).

Lastly, in setting the blank space between subtitles (frame gap), I had to do a bit of algebra. Netflix states that the minimum time between subtitles is 2 frames, whereas VSS lists this value in terms of milliseconds. When I opened the properties of the video file, I found that the frame rate was 29.97 frames per second (fps). Please pardon my handwriting and rudimentary math skills—I studied Latin American Studies as an undergrad and haven’t taken math since high school:

Therefore, the frame gap was 66.7 ms. The style guide also stipulates that Spanish-speaking adult viewers can read a maximum of 20 characters/second while English speakers can handle up to 17 characters/second. In setting the preferences for the project, I first set the limit to 20. When I performed QA in VSS, I was certain that my Spanish subtitles complied with Netflix.

According to Netflix, an ellipsis (...) should only be used in English subtitles to indicate a pause or dialogue that trails off. However, the style guide also states that when a sentence continues into the next subtitle, an ellipsis should not be placed at the beginning of the second subtitle. The Spanish style guide, in contrast, states that an ellipsis should be placed at the beginning of the second subtitle when a sentence spans two subtitles. This difference affected the character count of my subtitles and forced me to make a key stylistic decision.

Gilberto has a very natural and approachable speaking style; you feel as if you are sitting next to him in the studio. Yet, this poses a unique challenge for subtitling: I needed to be extremely judicious when using ellipses. If I indicated every instance in which he paused or trailed off, my subtitles would have...been...riddled...with...ellipses. The quantity of ellipses would have been...

...twice as overwhelming in Spanish.

I have yet to mention my workflow in creating this project, so I will touch on it to conclude. I transcribed, spotted and performed QA on the Spanish subtitles in VSS. I then copied the contents of the .srt file to a .txt file and removed line breaks. I saved that file as Drums_4T8n and opened it in Memsource, my CAT tool of choice—if you’re not hip to Memsource, you’re missing out. This tool accepts .srt files and allows you to seamlessly translate them. I was also able to impose a limit of 84 (42X2) characters per segment (subtitle). After translation, I downloaded the file, imported it into VSS and performed QA. After making minimal changes to the time coding of the English subtitles, I reopened the project. However, in this instance, I activated the Spanish subtitles and made the English subtitles the reference file. See below:

I was able to ensure that the subtitles for both languages had the same time codes. I performed a final round of QA in VLC but really just wanted to sit back and enjoy the show.