Faculty Spotlight

I come from a bicultural, bilingual background, so my brain has been translating for as long as I can remember. I started working as a subtitling translator by sheer chance for a nationwide TV network when I was 20 years old, while still completing a degree in foreign languages. Right off the bat, it clicked with my love for languages and research. It was a match made in heaven, and I never looked back. This profession allowed me, down the line, to be a full-time mom and to travel far and wide while working and spending time with family and friends. I’m a huge dog lover, a proud vegan, and an advocate for animal rights. As for this profession that I’m so grateful to, I am now focused on sharing knowledge that may be useful to others and on trying to build a tight community among audiovisual translation (AVT) professionals throughout the Americas by bringing visibility to our trade and standing up for our working conditions.

My area of expertise under the media localization umbrella is subtitling translation, and subtitling translation revision, both from English to Spanish and Spanish to English. I like to think this specialization chose me and not the other way around. Before finding subtitling, I had translated romantic novels, contracts, legal documents, corporate material, internal hotel manuals, transportation rules and regulations, among other things, none of which opened my eyes to the translation process as much as subtitling did, followed by dubbing adaptation later on. Translating media content has made me much more aware of the various approaches, strategies, tools, and the constant need for self-updating and research that the practice of translation requires.

I love translation origination the most because it feels like magic when we originate from scratch in the target language and craft lines for a movie or TV series in just the right register, nailing the nuance and conveying the original intent in a way that sounds natural for target-culture audiences. At the same time, we tackle technical and linguistic challenges, all while helping the plot move forward.

Sadly, in the last 10–15 years we have all seen our rates drop dramatically and our industry get automatized to the extent that the largest players avoid any kind of direct contact with linguists. Consequently, we have seen many seasoned peers leave the profession. Workflows have not changed that much. What has changed is that content owners are now paying much less money to language services providers (the industry-wide freelance employers) for localizing their content, and they keep cutting turnaround times, so quality has been impacted, which viewers around the world have certainly noticed and complained about. On the other hand, and mainly due to the ever-growing power of social media, we are glad to see a steady increase in:

• Accessibility options offered to hard-of-hearing and blind or sight-impaired audiences, which are now available in almost any platform or TV service provider.
• An awareness and thereby an increase in inclusive language being used in pertinent content as localization guidelines now include specific instructions on how to better serve previously ignored communities.
• Awareness of racist, discriminating, or offensive language. There is now a set of rules that localization professionals must observe to avoid any kind of offensive language.
• Receptiveness and a growing fandom for content that was not originally produced or spoken in traditionally “dominant” language(s), for the first time ever.
• Quality control monitoring. In the past 10 to 15 years, errors have been categorized for the first time, a practice that has spread throughout the entire localization industry. Also, performance has started to be monitored alongside each linguist’s metrics, which has really upped the ante as it’s now much more difficult to get into translation pools and stay there.

Media content is here to stay, and has exhibited constant growth year after year. As a result, our streaming media content localization market will always need more capable translators and linguists to cater to global audiences. As an example, Netflix alone has over 280 million subscribers in 2024.

For the first time in 2019, the largest player in the industry presented machine-translation renditions in its subtitling platform that linguists could choose from. Unfortunately, almost every rendition offered was literal, which in audiovisual translation is unthinkable as a machine cannot know what the context of the onscreen action is, if the dialogue should be in formal or informal terms of address, if “you” is singular or plural in the target language, and many other aspects that cannot be accurately conveyed with automatic text translation. As a result, so many of us repeatedly opted for deleting everything and starting from scratch. Since we continue to feed the machine with the translations we input, the options we are offered sometimes work, but automatic translation is still far from adequate in our field. In parallel though, subtitling software has evolved and has introduced many additional tools that make our lives easier and our turnaround times faster, which is what we need. Faster as long as quality is not compromised. The most exciting progress, for me, has been the introduction and development of user-friendly sound wave forms in major subtitling platforms, which has been teaching linguists how to time-to-shot-change much easier than ever before. This means that subtitlers working with the latest software have shortened the time they used to spend timing (or spotting) as they translate the subtitles in each file.

Investment in content production is at an all-time high, especially because audiences around the world are now excited to watch content in a number of languages that were not previously considered dominant languages in this space, so production has exploded. Furthermore, studios, streaming platforms, and other major content producers are on a much more level playing field now. All of this has made audiovisual translation/localization a multi-million dollar industry, growing at a faster pace than any other field of translation. Therefore, more and better translators will continue to be needed to meet the sky-high demand for global content.

Translation has many faces and anyone pursuing a career in Translation Studies should be properly informed about all the possible paths they can take. They should also be open to exploring and trying out many fields of translation until they find the one where they excel, all while taking in account how much time they want to spend working every week versus how much money they intend to make, and how good they want to get at it, that is, how much effort they are willing to put into their profession. Finally, I would advise any Translation Studies student to know they will continue to gain knowledge and expertise every day and they must have an eye for detail and an ego that can withstand some hits.