Outsourcing Subtitles to India

Oh, brother. Captions / subtitles fall victim to India outsourcing. The Infoweek article [Thanks, Stone Deaf Pilots] gives a good example of what happens when you send English translation to a place where English isn’t the first language.

For example, in the movie My Super Ex-Girlfriend, Uma Thurman utters the line “We have a zero-tolerance policy for (sexual harassment).”

But as rendered by Indian workers, the line reads like it’s from a Borat movie: “We hold the highest standards for sexual harassment by foreign workers.”

Yeah.
Oh, and Stone Deaf Pilots also reports on AOL captioning videos.

1 comments

  1. Yeah – not surprised.
    We’ve discussed about it thru closed-environment mailing list under captioning group at Yahoogroups.com last year. (You can join if you want to.)
    It’s going be interesting!
    gwlj

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