Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Titra (03.12.08)

Instead of subtitling classes we had a short trip yesterday. We visited Titra, a subtitling firm. It’s said to be the most popular and the best one in Austria. So I expected huge rooms and crowds of employees, but it turned out that Titra is all about huge machines, several people, small rooms and cooperating translators.
Titra creates mainly German, English and French subtitles, but there are few exceptions. First, a translator gets a film and a dialogue list with suited frames. When the subtitles are ready, the spotting begins, done by someone else. Other firms choose a different strategy: translators do both spotting and subtitling.
There is a separate room for translation quality check, and a separate for spotting quality check. When everything is done, huge machines burn subtitles on reels. And each film is usually split into several reels, e.g. 6.
The machines produce strange smell and a lot of heat. And it’s said that one such machine costs about 2 000 euro.

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