Automation, communication and quality in cloud platform subtitling

This presentation deals with recent developments in freelance subtitling work within the audiovisual translation (AVT) industry. Since the 2010s, audiovisual production volumes have increased dramatically, and many LSPs operating globally have moved their provision of paid, professional subtitling services on cloud platforms, where the challenges posed by high volumes have been met with increasing standardisation and automation of processes. In the industry, standardisation and automation are seen as crucial conditions to reach predefined levels of quality, especially in such a growing sector; in addition to that, they constitute frameworks through which quality and performance are managed and controlled. Dynamics of standardisation, automation and control have been recognised in the translation industry as pertaining to Digital Taylorism, and cloud platforms provide the technology that can enable such industrial model of production. Cloud subtitling platforms are digital workstations in which tasks occur and can be recorded; in sum, they provide the hardware and software environment where a high number of users, such as freelancers, project managers and clients, can access and process audiovisual content from all around the globe. Many platforms have been using automation across several aspects of the subtitling profession, including job assignment; users' communication; use of Machine Translation in actual subtitling production; and quality assessment of subtitles and subtitlers’ performance. The presentation will provide an overview of the average features of cloud subtitling, and focus on the automation of job assignment, communication and quality assessment as emerged in a workplace study, and in interviews with freelance subtitlers. The presentation will then move on to the data analysis, which points at how automation, while potentially capable of generating collaborative environments, is being used in ways which serve certain stakeholders more than others, and discourages communication, negotiation and interaction, thus impeding real collaboration and trust-building amongst the different parties. The analysis of information and communication patterns points to a situation of unsustainability, intended as the inability to equally meet the professional and communicational requirements of the various actors in the network, which ultimately risks to compromise the quality of the subtitlers’ position in these production networks.