The success of Squid Game reveals the fatal weakness of global online movie services
Last month, a celebrity in the Korean-American translation world, Youngmi Mayer took to TikTok and Twitter to lament that the English subtitles for Netflix’s hit series Squid Game were so bad. The most important nuances are lost in the English translation. Not only that, the Hindi and French translations were equally disparaging and the English voiceover as a joke.
Although many translation experts say these comments are unfair, it also shows an unexpected shortage that is happening with the explosion of online movie services globally: movies. language service providers – or LSPs, companies that provide subtitles and dubbing services through a worldwide network of collaborators.
“The Squid Game is another sign that demand for locally produced media content is extending beyond the local audience – content from Korea is reaching outside of Korea, content from Mexico is growing. beyond Mexico.” said Paolo Sigismondi, professor at the University of Southern California.
No one to translate, no one to voice
While Netflix’s Squid Game series attracts more than 111 million viewers globally, the vast majority are watched with subtitles translated from Korean into 31 different languages and 13 other dubbed versions. It was the LSPs that became the core of the Korean film’s global release.
But while streaming services are booming globally, the translation industry is facing a shortage of human resources and no automated technology solution to replace it. In short, the whole industry is being pushed to its limits.
David Lee, CEO of Iyuno-SDI, one of the industry’s largest subtitle translation and dubbing service providers, said:No one to translate, no one to voice, no one to mix – the whole industry is under-resourced for this.“
While Netflix’s service has reached 130 countries globally, competitors like Disney+ and HBO Max are also vying for similar scale. This has also led to a skyrocketing demand for subtitling and dubbing services for their huge film inventory.
Fetner, who used to work as a director at Netflix, said that until recently translation service providers were still catching up with this demand, but things are changing. “Now that it has reached its saturation point, the sponge cannot absorb any more water. Every day I hear someone talk about how they had to turn down this job.“
The gap in the supply of interpreters is not easy to fill
Training a new generation of interpreters takes time and, more importantly, wages. Only one out of 50 applicants, Lee said, passes the interpreting test of Iyuno-SDI, which translates to more than 100 languages with 600,000 episodes a year.
Low wages and poor compensation also make it more difficult to recruit professional translators. While Netflix pays $13 per minute to translate Korean dialogue with English subtitles, only a fraction of that goes to translators. Last year, many translation associations in Europe blacklisted Iyuno-SDI, encouraging members not to work for the company as it increasingly cuts wages for freelance subtitle translators.
The data shows that, even before the crisis in translation supplies, subtitle quality was an issue for viewers in Europe. A recent survey by the Association for the Globalization of Entertainment EGA of 15,000 streaming service subscribers in Spain, Germany, France and Italy, revealed that about 61% of users have problems with subtitle quality and voiceover. As a result, 70% of respondents said they had stopped watching any TV shows or movies that had language problems.
In response to the problem of supply shortage, in recent years, many attempts to automate the translation process have been made in response to the large amount of new content of streaming services. Lyuno-SDI itself also invests in the field of translation by machine learning and automatic quality checking, but company leaders said that the translation quality of AI is still far behind that of humans.
Typically, machine learning is currently being used to generate draft translations, which translators then check and revise. This also means that the capabilities of AI are still not comparable to the art of translating human captions, nor are they an emergency solution to the current shortage.
Not only translation agencies, streaming services are also starting to pay attention to this shortage. In response to criticism of Squid Game’s subtitles, Netflix also turned to Sharon Choi, a famous translator for subtitles for the movie Parasite last year. Her name even appears alongside the original translation for the English subtitled version of the Squid Game.
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