Will Hackett-Jones (1987-93)
If you’re anything like most of the rest of the world, you’ve probably spent some time in recent years streaming TV series from Amazon Prime, the BBC, or Netflix. You may even be guilty of binge-watching some favourites – Killing Eve, Big Little Lies, Game of Thrones all come to mind.
If you’re a bit more adventurous, you might even know about Brazil’s 3%, France’s The Returned, Sweden’s Quicksand, Germany’s Dark, or Spain’s Cable Girls, all top TV shows available online – with English subtitles.
Much to my surprise, I’m one of those people who subtitles foreign TV shows. Unfortunately, I haven’t had the honour of working on any of those shows, but that’s because I live and work in Russia, so those we work on are Russian language shows, subtitling them into English for foreign markets.
I own a small translation business; I set it up 10 years ago, though I’ve been living here for 15 years now. There was another business before this one – a magazine publishing business, but that went bust in the crash of 2008/9, leaving me with plenty of debt and looking for work.
Fortunately, for some time, people had been saying things to me like “Great magazine, but no thanks; what I really do need, though, is some translation, can you do that?” “No” was my usual answer; I wasn’t interested in it, because I was running a magazine. “Hey, look, I could really do with an English teacher, how about it?” would be another question to which I’d answer, exasperated: “No. Been there, done that.” When these things repeat, however, it’s worth taking off your stubborn hat, and putting on your curious hat. There’s a reason it’s happening, which you probably can’t see yet.
So, after a good few people had asked me about translation, I started looking into it. Going rates, problems people faced, freelancer fees, etc. I found that:
There were no companies on the Russian market offering high-quality, expensive translation services
Everyone was using Russian-speakers to translate into English, because it was many times cheaper than using native English speakers
Clients were crying out for high-quality work, and constantly being let down
The margins in translation could be a lot better than the negative margins in publishing
Armed with this research, I set about using my old publishing contacts to find clients for my new translation business. I started off with a business partner, who very fortunately had a credit card. We used that to fund the first month or two of freelancer payments, before we had a cashflow coming in.
Our research had told us that the golden standard in translation is to have three people work on a text – a translator, an editor, and a proof reader, all native speakers of the target language. So if you’re translating Russian to English, they should all be native English speakers. We found these people among freelancers around the world, tested them, instructed those who passed to work the way we wanted, and kept the proofreading, the final quality control check, in-house. As in, that was me doing it.
The quality of our work spoke for itself, and soon we were getting recommendations, so we never had to go looking for clients. The hardest thing was finding freelancers who were keen enough to learn new skills, yet good enough at translation to hit the ground running. It still is a big problem; in all these years, we’ve only found a handful of people good enough to proofread. And indeed, we’ve mostly changed the editing stage out for what we call ‘reviewing’. We found that most editors either weren’t good enough to find the mistakes left by the translators, or (worse still) introduced their own mistakes! In trying to address this problem, we decided to experiment with using a native Russian speaker in the middle stage, to review the translation. They don’t actually change the text themselves, but they write comments on the mistakes they find, categorising the mistake, explaining what’s wrong, and offering an example solution. This then goes back to the translator, who has to fix the errors in their own work (thereby ensuring constant improvement), and then it goes on to the proof reader.
While all this was happening, a few years into the business’ life we got a phone call: “Hi, I’ve been told you guys do translation, with native English speakers.” “Yes, we do. How can we help?” “We need subtitles done for a film we’re working on. Can you do subtitles?” There was a pause. An awkward one. My partner and I nodded at each other – we were game to try anything, and a little white lie here probably wasn’t going to hurt. “Err, yes, sure, we can do that. What’s the job?” She explained the job – fortunately it wasn’t urgent. We jumped straight onto Google to find out what subtitling programmes looked like, what the industry standards were, and basically how to do it. No, we had no idea; but it’s closely related to translating, with an added technical dimension, so we were fairly confident we could work it out.
About a month later, we’d produced our first set of subtitles. We didn’t charge enough money for it at the time, so it took a lot of time and didn’t return much profit. We also didn’t know anyone else in the film industry, so we didn’t really have any idea how much more work like that there could be. So we just left it be: an interesting experience.
But then once again the recommendations started flowing. The same producers came back to us with other projects. Then others turned up. Then more, and now subtitling is about 50% of the business.
It’s great work – sometimes I can’t believe I get to sit and watch films at work! And it’s also challenging – in every single subtitle, you have to balance reading speed with accurate translation; nuance with comprehension; jokes with character counts.
We’ve been lucky enough to work on two Oscar nominated films, at least four Cannes-award winning films, and numerous others from raucous TV series, to experimental not-quite-documentary. It’s been fascinating, and as the rate of consumption of foreign-language films and TV shows increases around the world, it looks like this line of business will only continue to grow.
