Subtitling is more than translating. It’s the art of providing entertainment content in English, within a limited number of frames, in a timely manner.

As a subber, I aim for three things: fast, smooth, and accurate.

1. Fast. Entertainment is all about the hype. People watch something, then talk about it, and seeing how many people are talking about it makes other people want to watch it. When a group of people are locked out of the hype because of language or availability, then that’s when the pirated copies or the fansubs come out.
2. Smooth. Human brain is wired to detect few keywords and match the rest with a pre-anticipated sentence structure that they’re familiar with. Therefore, if you use English that don’t sound “natural” or what people are familiar with, it causes the brain to pause and re-read every word carefully. This, in turn, breaks the immersion when they’re watching shows in real time. Note, smoothness not the same as localization. It’s possible to write natural-sounding English without being specific to one culture.
3. Accurate. This is the only common aspect between subtitling and translating. It must be accurate, of course! But there is 2 types of accuracy when it comes to Japanese to English translations. First, the subject, verb, and object must match the original Japanese. That is what most people think of as “accurate.” However, Japanese is a highly contextual language, whereas English is not. So in translating to English, you oftentimes have to inject context, and you need to inject the correct context. Again, both of these types of accuracies are required in any translation, not just subtitling.

Over the years, I’ve seen every kind of subbers. You’ve got the speed subber who is so intent on releasing subs fast–before anyone else–that they don’t bother checking for accuracy. You’ve got the purists who get fed up with the speed subber’s quality and decide to release **extra accurate** subs which become wordy. You’ve got the large-production subbers (often times a group that can afford both a translator for the accuracy and an editor for the smoothness) but takes forever because the subs have to pass through so many people.

And you may think, Japanese people don’t say phrases in the exact same way as English, so how can you achieve smoothness without losing accuracy? You are right, and that’s why subtitling is an art form. On a line-by-line basis, subbers should determine what’s the right balance of accuracy and smoothness to convey what is happening in the scene.

Example 1. Watashitachi wa Douka Shiteiru EP07, mountain scene.

The original line is: 店へ行ったら七桜ちゃん帰ってないって聞いて｡

The translated line would be: When (implicit I) went to the store, (I) heard that Nao-chan (still) haven’t returned yet.

Step 1: Replace “Nao-chan” with “you” because in English, we use 2nd person pronouns to speak to someone.

Result: When I went to the store, I heard that you still haven’t returned yet.
But this is a 2.2 second scene so with the above sentence, we are at 24 cps (character per second).

Step 2: Subject. Rephrase “when I went to the store, I heard”. From context, if Takigawa heard something at the store, then it’s already implied that he went to the store. So we can rephrase “when I went to the store, I heard” to “Someone at the store told me…”. Now, “someone at the store” is still too wordy and here is where I took the liberty to assume who in the store it was. Given the previous scenes where there was no other employee, we can’t assume she has coworkers. But a shop will always have an owner, so I used “shop owner”.

Result: The shop owner told me you still haven’t returned yet.
We are getting closer. This is at 19cps right now.

Step 3. Verb. Replace “told me” with “said”. We lose the accuracy of whether the shop owner told this specifically to him or to everyone in general including him, but that distinction is not really important in this scene.

Result: The shop owner said you still haven’t returned yet.
We are at 18cps.

Step 4. Object. Rephrase “you still haven’t returned yet” to “you’ve been gone a while”. In order for Nao to have not returned, she had to have left. And for people to be worried, she must have been gone for a long time.

Result: The shop owner said you’ve been gone for a while.
Hurray, we are at 15cps. However, the previous scene was 6cps which means the viewer have to read twice as fast here. To help reduce the burden a little more…

Step 5. Optimization. Drop “for a while” because “…been gone for a while” is such a common phrase that people can assume the rest if we just say “…been gone”.

Result: The shop owner said you’ve been gone.

Alternatives:

I could have said “The shop owner said you’ve left for a while” but “left for a while” doesn’t have the same sense of urgency as “been gone a while” because it’s in an active voice, meaning it could be interpreted as “Nao intended to leave for a while”. A passive voice here would make it clear that “Nao didn’t intend to leave for such a long time, and thus something is wrong.”

Phew. There you have it. One line done.