Translating subtitles well

Condensing is the core skill

A document translation can be as long as it needs to be. A subtitle cannot. When the translated sentence runs longer than the window the original speech left behind, something has to give, and the right answer is almost always to say the same thing in fewer words rather than to let the line run past readable.

• Cut what the picture already shows. If someone points at a door and says look at that door, the subtitle does not need the door.
• Cut filler that carries no meaning. Hesitations, false starts, and verbal tics are part of speech and clutter in text.
• Prefer the shorter synonym when both are natural. Small savings across a file add up to lines that fit.
• Do not cut meaning. Condensing is choosing a shorter way to say the same thing, not deciding which half of the sentence matters.

Register, decided once

Many languages force a choice English does not: formal or informal address. Spanish has tú and usted, French tu and vous, German du and Sie, Russian ты and вы, Polish uses Pan and Pani, Japanese and Korean encode politeness in the verb itself. The choice has to be made on the first line and held to the last, because switching halfway reads as a mistake.

For anything published to an audience you do not know, the formal form is usually the safe default. Exceptions are real: a casual creator channel addressing peers often reads better informally, and some languages, such as Swedish and Norwegian, have essentially abandoned formal address in everyday use. Each language page notes what is conventional for that language.

Names and terms

• Proper nouns usually stay as they are, but not always. Names of organisations and places sometimes have an established form in the target language, and using the English one reads as careless.
• In non-Latin scripts, decide whether a name is transliterated or left in Latin script, then be consistent. Both are defensible; alternating is not.
• Product and technical terms need a decision. Many fields use the English term untranslated in everyday speech, and forcing a native equivalent nobody says makes the subtitle harder to follow, not easier.
• Get names right in the transcript before you publish. Within a job, a mis-heard name is translated as the wrong name, and every language you run transcribes the audio again, so each one needs the same check.

Idiom, humour, and things that do not carry

An idiom translated word for word produces a sentence that is grammatical and meaningless. The job is to find the equivalent expression in the target language, or, when there is none, to translate what the speaker meant rather than what they said. Wordplay and jokes that depend on the sound of a specific language often cannot survive at all, and the honest options are to substitute a different joke or to translate the meaning plainly and let the audio carry the delivery.

Consistency across a file

• One term, one translation, throughout. A concept that changes name partway through a video makes the video harder to follow than a slightly imperfect term used consistently.
• One register, throughout.
• One convention for numbers, dates, and units, matching the target locale.
• One decision on transliteration, applied everywhere.