November 5, 2007
Subfans
US TV series, uploaded onto video sharing sites right after their broadcast, are often translated into another language with subtitles within hours.
I've tried to find out who are these people, who spend hours translating entire episodes for the benefit of others. Here's what I found about the French language translators.
According to an October article from Sud Ouest, they are called "subfans" and for the most part are students, college kids, or TV series fans. They work in a group to subtitle all the episodes of an entire season using the Teletext transcripts which are available in English. The French translation is then synched with the original episode, taking into account commercials if there are any.
Apparently, subfans are very critical of the official translations done by French TV channels. They claim translations are "water downed" versions" of the original. As their dubbing is not endorsed by the networks, their work is considered rogue and counterfeit.
Amongst themselves and their faithful viewers, they are a subculture and enjoy a somewhat celebrity status online. Too much publicity can hurt them, as was the case for the Perfect Life team, which dissolved and shut down their website following too much media attention of their activity.
If you speak French, you can watch a video of Swiss TSR nouvo's special report aired last year, where they interviewed several people who dub TV series.
One Parisian woman using editing software subtitle workshop said it takes about 8 hours to translate one episode. On why she spends her time doing this? Because of the networks' poor quality of translation, she replied.
Nouvo also interviewed a copyright lawyer who blamed rogue translators for inciting people to watch copyright material on video sharing websites.
Interesting, last year, immensely popular American TV series represented 31% of TSR's programming. That's how popular they are.
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