Tracking the distribution of non-professional subtitles to study new audiences

Abstract

This paper analyzes the consumers in the context of non-professional subtitling (NPS). Using web scraping techniques to collect data about the downloading rate of non-professional subtitles we explore the behavior of consumers. Drawing on the case of the subtitles for House of Cards in Addic7ed.com, a popular multilingual non-professional subtitle distribution website, we describe the consumption of non-professional subtitles and the users' response. After outlining the situation of the international audiences for audiovisual products and the relevance of consumers as the driving force behind NPS communities, we analyze the collected data in terms of their interest in the originality of the content and their wish to access the content immediately after it is available. Our findings indicate that the users of non-professional subtitles are highly engaged consumers, eager to access the content as soon as possible and interested in watching it in its original language (English), even with intralingual (same-language) subtitles.

Iranian Amateur Subtitling Apparatus: A Qualitative Investigation

“…In other words, fansubbers make every effort to release subtitles for a given program at the earliest opportunity, and to reach an enthusiastic and larger audience. Additionally, two reasons have been ascribed to the popularity of non-professional subtitling; audiences wish to access foreign audiovisual programs within a shorter time period, and they simply dislike dubbing (Orrego-Carmona & Richter, 2018).…”

“…Although the research has gradually shifted from conventional translation types such as dubbing and subtitling to new emerging modalities, including fan translation, very little research has addressed Persian amateur trans-lation in the realm of avt. Most research on non-professional subtitling is derived from a European and East Asian context (for example see Orrego-Carmona & Lee, 2017b). Given the fertile ground offered by this underexplored phenomenon in Iran, this article is intended to shed some light on this unauthorized and non-professional practice in Iran.…”

A holistic approach to non-professional subtitling from a functional quality perspective

“…The relevance of speed and access is supported by the findings of Orrego-Carmona and Richter (2018). The study tracked the downloads of subtitles for the third season of House of Cards over a two-week period after the release of the third season, and found that 66.1% of the total downloads (480,298) occurred during the first four days 1 .…”

“…To apply Chesterman's proposition of functional quality¸ in what follows I will highlight some of the key findings of a series of studies exploring non-professional subtitling (Orrego-Carmona 2011, 2016bPym, Orrego-Carmona, and Torres-Simón 2016;Orrego-Carmona and Richter 2018). By analyzing the production of reception conditions of nonprofessional subtitling, this review will explore the phenomenon from a holistic perspective and provide a new overview of the NPS communities under consideration.…”

“…Drawing on a series of studies, in this article I claim non-professional translation should be studied in a comprehensive manner that assesses quality based on the conditions in which translations come to be and the situations in which they are used. While it largely relies on previous publications (Orrego-Carmona 2011, 2016bPym, Orrego-Carmona, and Torres-Simón 2016;Orrego-Carmona and Richter 2018), this article presents a new and thorough analysis of the results to provide a solid framework to study the NPS phenomenon.…”