Understanding and Managing Information Asymmetry in the Subtitling Industry
Ceri Pollard
University of Geneva
Client education has already been a topic of discussion in translation studies research, described as an inevitable part of translation projects (Walker, 2023), a root cause of subtitlers’ poor working conditions (Künzli, 2022; Kuo, 2015) or as damaging to subtitling principles (Skwarek et al., 2024). The necessity of client education implies the existence of information asymmetry (Akerlof, 1970; Chan, 2011) between clients and subtitlers. There have been attempts from translators at improving client education and redressing this imbalance (e.g. Durban, 2014), but it is not clear how successful these attempts have been. This presentation, based on my PhD research, discusses the principles of information asymmetry and change management in the subtitling context, at the same time developing the concept of translation industry literacy (inspired by Bowker, 2019). The PhD project aims to apply these concepts within the framework of translation industry studies to explore the extent to which translation industry literacy can be embedded in client institutional memory.
This presentation will inform the work of practitioners in the following ways:
- Expanding the scope to solicit the opinions other key stakeholders in the subtitling workflow who have so far been relatively absent from studies
- Introducing and applying practical management concepts with the explicit aim of enabling more fruitful collaboration between practitioners and clients
Keywords: Client education, translation industry studies, change management, information asymmetry, TI literacy
Bibliography
Akerlof, G.A., 1970. The Market for “Lemons”: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism. Q. J. Econ. 84, 488–500. https://doi.org/10.2307/1879431
Bowker, L., 2019. Machine Translation Literacy as a Social Responsibility. Presented at the Language Technologies for All (LT4All), Paris.
Chan, A.L.J., 2011. Information economics and the translation profession: an empirical investigation into translator certification and other signaling mechanisms in the translation marketplace. LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, Saarbrücken, Germany.
Durban, C., 2014. Translation: Getting it Right.
Künzli, A., 2022. How subtitling professionals perceive changes in working conditions: An interview study in German-speaking countries. Transl. Interpret. Stud. 18, 91–112. https://doi.org/10.1075/tis.20107.kun
Kuo, A.S.-Y., 2015. Professional Realities of the Subtitling Industry: The Subtitlers’ Perspective, in: Piñero, R.B., Cintas, J.D. (Eds.), Audiovisual Translation in a Global Context. Palgrave Macmillan UK, London, pp. 163–191. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137552891_10
Skwarek, A., Szarkowska, A., Szkriba, S., 2024. Are Templates Killing the Subtitling Principles? Subtitlers’ Views on the Impact of Templates on the Media Localisation Industry. J. Audiov. Transl. 7, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.47476/jat.v7i2.2024.288
Walker, C., 2023. Translation project management, Routledge introductions to translation and interpreting. Routledge, London.
Ceri Pollard is a PhD student at the Faculty of Translation and Interpreting at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. She holds an MA in Translation and Specialised Multilingual Communication also from the University of Geneva and a BA in Translation, Media and French from the University of East Anglia. Her BA and MA dissertations were both on the topic of creative subtitling. She also worked for several years as a professional subtitler, working in-house at a UK-based LSP. Her research interests include the subtitling industry, creative subtitles and audience reception/cognitive processing studies.
