Quality Control in the Subtitling Industry: An Exploratory Survey Study

Abstract

L’assurance de la qualité et le contrôle de la qualité jouent un rôle prépondérant dans le monde professionnel de la traduction, ainsi que dans la recherche en traduction. Il en va de même de la révision, aujourd’hui considérée comme faisant partie intégrante de l’assurance qualité. D’ailleurs, la révision constitue un élément de l’assurance qualité rendu obligatoire par la norme européenne EN 15 038 sur les services de traduction (European Committee for Standardization 2006). Si la qualité est également un thème récurrent dans les conférences consacrées à la traduction audiovisuelle, dans la pratique, la mise en oeuvre de mesures d’assurance de la qualité ou de contrôle de la qualité varie et les recherches en traduction audiovisuelle centrées sur l’assurance ou le contrôle qualité, y compris la révision, sont très limitées. Dans le présent article, nous nous proposons dans un premier temps de clarifier un certain nombre de problèmes terminologiques. Ensuite, nous examinerons la littérature scientifique portant sur les paramètres de qualité et les procédures de révision des traductions, pour enfin rendre compte des résultats d’une enquête menée en 2013 auprès de sous-titreurs professionnels, à propos de l’assurance et du contrôle de la qualité tels qu’ils les pratiquent au quotidien.Quality assurance (QA) and quality control (QC) are central to translation practice and research today, as is translation revision, which, today, is increasingly seen as an integral part of quality monitoring. Revision is also explicitly mentioned as a quality requirement in the European Standard for Translation Services EN 15 038, issued by the European Committee for Standardization (2006). Quality issues have also been a recurring topic at audiovisual translation (AVT) conferences, but in AVT, practice levels of QA and QC appear to be subject to fluctuations, and AVT research into QA and QC, including revision, is quite limited. This article will first clarify a number of terminological issues, discuss some of the relevant literature on translation and revision quality parameters and procedures, and report on a detailed survey conducted in 2013 on QA and QC practices in the subtitling industry

Quality is in the eye of the stakeholders: what do professional subtitlers and viewers think about subtitling?

“…In their study on quality control in the subtitling industry, Robert et al [38] allocate importance to the translation process by distinguishing between quality management, quality assurance and quality control at three different stages, i.e. pre-translation, during translation and post-translation.…”

Framing Media Accessibility Quality

“…For quite some time, research and industry have focused on the development and implementation of access services, while policies have focused on promoting the widespread adoption of those services and setting quotas (Romero-Fresco, 2016). However, over the past few years, the different actors, especially scholars, have increasingly started to turn their attention to the quality of those services, through the development of quality models (e.g., Pedersen, 2017;Romero-Fresco & Pérez, 2015;Romero-Fresco & Pöchhacker, 2018), the analysis of quality in production practices (e.g., Robert & Remael, 2016), and the discussion of the impact of machine translation on the quality of access services (e.g., Doherty & Kruger, 2018), just to name a few cases. As stated above, the rise of quality as a major concern can be connected to the three major shifts MA has been experiencing over the past few years.…”

Assessing quality in live interlingual subtitling: a new challenge

“…The central issues determining the quality of pre-prepared interlingual subtitling have been detailed in Díaz Cintas and Remael (2007), Kuo (2014) and, more recently, in Robert and Remael (2016). They can be subdivided into form-related and content-related quality issues, even though the two are strongly connected.…”