A recently released Netflix original Korean web series, ‘Squid Game‘, has gripped the globe with its brilliant storyline, acting and production. The show has made it into many must-watch lists and it will likely be in many top 10 TV series of 2021 – even becoming the best show of 2021 in quite a few of them as well. However, the show isn’t without its problems and it apparently comes from an unlikely place – the subtitles. With an International show like ‘Squid Game’ also having subtitle problems, are we now seriously considering this issue to be an “OTT Subtitle Crisis”?
Before many think that we are making wild accusations, we need to understand that this is not just an Indian or a non-English language issue – it is a problem that is currently being faced by every major OTT platform currently in this business. Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, Disney+ Hotstar, ZEE5 and many others have continued to provide us with very good content with subpar subtitles over the past months (almost a year now). This is unacceptable, especially since we are consuming more and varied content as the months go by, especially since the pandemic started.
So why are subtitle errors such a big deal? Many would say that having a basic understanding of the content in front of us should be enough. But for shows and movies like ‘Dark’, ‘Squid Game’, ‘Nayattu’, ‘Operation Java’, etc. which require nuance and proper translation, will get affected by these bare-minimum translations. What’s more, content from various languages of India such as Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, etc. as well as other Asian languages such as Japanese, Korean, etc. use emotions and other non-elliguble sounds to convey meaning, which gets lost in translation.
Of course, one of the primary issues causing this Subtitle Crisis could be that there is way too much content for a small QC (Quality Control) Team to handle alone. Keeping a linguistic expert of every language would obviously be a stretch, but keeping two or more people who can speak the same language to translate the same content at the same time will probably help in keeping these subtitle errors to a minimum. Another way to reduce these subtitle problems would be to sit with the writer/director/subtitler and work on the subtitles together.
Of course, calling this issue a crisis is too harsh. But before it truly becomes an actual major problem, OTT platforms need to think about their internal quality checking teams, which have been coming under fire lately for these shoddy translations.
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