Screen translation and text Expansion for the Movie and Televison

Recently a friend, who is a graphics editor, made a comment about the translations of a video he was editing being longer than the original dialog, which was causing obvious problems for captioning purposes. “After all why use two words when five will do instead!” he said. Despite his lack of linguistic knowledge, my friend had hit upon something fundamental to translation. Translated texts, especially translations from English, are often longer than the original. We refer to this as “text expansion”.

Translated texts, especially translations from English, are often longer than the original. We refer to this as “text expansion”.

But why is this the case when they say the same thing? Are some languages just more efficient than others? Text expansion, or contraction (where the translation is shorter than the original text) is due to several factors. Part of it is due to the nature of different languages – sentence structure, word usage, grammatical features of the language, etc. For example, some languages change the endings of words to convey grammatical features, such as the conjugation of a verb, or the status (subject, object) of a noun. Other languages leave those words unchanged and instead add small “helping” words to achieve the same purpose. For example, the French “J’irais” takes less space than the English equivalent, “I would go.” Another example is that possessives can be done in English simply by adding “’s”. A phrase like “Maria’s book” in Spanish would be “el libro de Maria,” which uses twice as many words.

You can see how this would cause a problem for subtitling, when cramming captions into the picture in the original language can often be a tight squeeze. You may have noticed from watching TV with the captions on that often caption writers will change the dialog slightly to save on characters. Translations for captioning purposes can be done with this in mind, and where character limits are provided, a good translator can make every effort to fit their translation into this. However, reworking a translation with such constraints takes extra time and talent, so this service will of course cost more. In my friend’s case, this had not been done, which meant he had to spend a lot of time re-editing the graphics to get all the text in – which certainly cost more than it would have to pay the extra for screen translation.

Keeping language expansion in mind is particularly important where the appearance of a file is important as well as its content. Planning in flexibility for text to expand when creating the initial file pays dividends when the time comes for localization.

References:
https://www.globalization-group.com/edge/2010/05/text-expansion-contraction-in-translation/
https://www.kwintessential.co.uk/translation/articles/expansion-retraction.html

 

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