Pivot subtitling workflows in the age of streaming platforms

Abstract

The proliferation and popularity of non-English audiovisual productions have been fostered by streaming platforms in recent years. From the point of view of translation, the language diversity encountered in audiovisual content poses logistic, linguistic and culture-specific challenges to the entertainment and media localization industry, which has largely resorted to the use of pivot language translation. In the case of subtitling, this involves the creation of a master template in a third language (English) that mediates between the original text (e.g., in Korean) and the target texts (e.g., in Turkish, Spanish, German or Italian). Despite its central role in the global dissemination of non-English media, the practice of pivot subtitling remains largely under-standardized as well as under-researched. The limited studies carried out so far in this field suggest that indirect translation of audiovisual material through pivot templates undermines the quality of the final version and leads to more complex workflows (Oziemblewska & Szarkowska, 2020; Torres-Simón et al., 2023). Against this backdrop, this paper offers an overview of the pivot subtitling workflows implemented in the media localization industry world-wide, with a focus on the challenges they pose from the point of view of various stakeholders, including subtitlers. The discussion draws on information gathered from a project aimed at strengthening links between academia and industry and at furthering our understanding of current developments in media localization. The findings highlight the challenges that different pivot subtitling processes pose to the agents involved and reveal similarities and differences between direct and pivot subtitling workflows.