Communicating in the Web: Spreading vs Selling
This is a basic difference for me, and I will refer to it often. I think it’s quite self-explanatory, but every now and then we do run into people who don’t understand why someone would pay for a multimedia translation service when you can get it for free, so I’ll elaborate a little bit.
First of all, I love the internet. I love its reach, its speed, its lack of boundaries. I love the interactivity it provides. I love the amount of knowledge it makes available for everyone.
Blogs, podcasts, webinars, online courses and social media are wonderful tools. We are getting more information than ever, kids are learning so much quicker, and ideas are being conceived, developed and deployed globally using web tools.
Language is the biggest obstacle to true globalization — even more than technology, I think. English is currently the world’s lingua franca, but this doesn’t mean that everyone can understand it. It only means that it’s the language that is most translated from and to. Continue reading →
Subtitling Decluttering Tips
Just a quick note to let you know that my business partner, Bianca Bold, and myself just got an article published on The ATA Chronicle. It gives multimedia translators some grammar and style tips to “declutter” subtitles — i.e., to write a more concise and clear text.
I hope you enjoy it!
“Time to Declutter! 15 Decluttering Tips for Subtitling (And Other Media)” in: The ATA Chronicle, a publication of the American Translators Association, November/December 2012, Volume XLI, Number 11, pp. 10-13.
Multimedia Ballet & Opera
How can a “dying art”, as many refer to opera, or an old-fashioned dance style, suddenly attract new generations and reach the largest public ever?
By entering the Multimedia Age, of course!
Some ballet and opera companies have been broadcasting their shows live to cinemas worldwide, such as the Bolshoi Ballet, the Metropolitan Opera, the Royal Ballet and the Royal Opera House. Emerging Pictures lists most of these broadcasts. Continue reading →
Radical Openness
Today I’ll write less and let this video do the talking.
“RADICAL OPENNESS” – for TEDGlobal 2012 by @JasonSilva from Jason Silva on Vimeo. Continue reading →
The Book Industry & Multimedia
Ah, the delicious smell of a good old paper book! It can bring us back to simpler times, when words remained right there where they belonged, attached to their pages for decades.
Now books are under threat by the internet and new media and all those things made of ephemeral bits and bites, and new generations are forgetting how to read and write…
Wait. Are they really? Continue reading →
“Lost in Translation, Found in Subtitles”
The Wall Street Journal published an excellent piece by Anthony Paletta about the importance of professional subtitling, notably the need to distinguish between “proper” subtitling and the many amateur, free alternatives out there.
I have to say that I never thought I would read something as gorgeous as the paragraph below in the press:
And much as our increasingly Web-based culture has blurred the line between amateur and professional journalism, often eroding newsgathering standards in the process, an expansion of crowd-sourced translation risks obscuring the essential—but already underappreciated—distinction between subtitling a movie and translating its words.
The truth is that not many translators are aware of this essential distinction, and Anthony Paletta deserves a round of applause for pointing it out. Continue reading →
Carol Alfaro