Between Two Screens

Lucia Ferrer has spent nearly fifteen years translating movies and television series between Spanish and English. Working from a small studio in Valencia, she has subtitled everything from police dramas to children's cartoons, and these days much of her work is for streaming platforms. We spoke about jokes that refuse to travel, the tyranny of the character count and why the best subtitles are the ones nobody notices.

"Let's start with the basics. What makes subtitling different from other kinds of translation?"

"Space and time, mostly. Someone translating a novel can take a whole page to express what the author said in a paragraph. I can't. On most of my projects, a subtitle can have two lines at most, each of roughly forty characters, and it has to stay on screen long enough to be read but not so long that it lingers after the actor has stopped talking. Clients usually set a maximum reading speed, measured in characters per second. So I'm constantly cutting. A character might ramble for several seconds, hedging and hesitating, and what appears on screen is one short, clean sentence. My job is to give them the meaning without making them miss the scene."

"Doesn't that mean losing a great deal?"

"Inevitably, and you have to make peace with that. People sometimes complain that the subtitles don't match what the actors are saying, and word for word they're often right. But subtitles aren't a transcript. They're a kind of compressed retelling. Viewers are watching faces, listening to tone of voice and following the action. If I tried to squeeze in every word, they'd spend the whole episode reading and miss the performance."

"Which is harder to translate, jokes or slang?"

"Jokes, without a doubt, and puns above all. I once worked on a sitcom in which an entire scene depended on the fact that the English word for the noise a dog makes is also the word for the outer layer of a tree. There's no Spanish word that does both jobs, so the joke simply collapses. In cases like that, I ask myself what the scene really needs. Does it need that particular joke, or does it need the audience to laugh at that moment? Usually it's the second, so I write a different joke that works in Spanish and still fits the images. Purists hate it. But I think a literal translation followed by silence is worse than a free one that gets a laugh."

"And slang?"

"Slang has its own trap, which is that it ages very quickly and varies enormously from one country to another. Spanish is spoken in more than twenty countries, and a word that sounds perfectly natural to a teenager in Madrid might sound odd, or even rude, to one in Mexico City or Buenos Aires. Platforms often commission one version for Spain and another for Latin America, but even then I tend to choose slang that is informal without being too local, and not so fashionable that it will sound dated in two years' time. Swearing is a separate headache. Rude words don't carry the same weight in both languages, and something that sounds mild when it's spoken can look much stronger written on the screen."

"What about cultural references?"

"That's where judgment comes in. If an American character mentions a talk show host or a brand of cereal that nobody in Spain has heard of, I have to decide quickly. Sometimes I keep the reference, because it tells you something about where the story takes place. Sometimes I replace it with something more general, like a famous presenter or simply breakfast cereal. What I almost never do is add an explanation. There isn't room, and a subtitle that needs a footnote has already failed."

"Has technology changed your work?"

"Enormously. When I started, I spent hours marking exactly where each subtitle should begin and end. Now software does much of that timing for me, and machine translation can produce a rough first draft in seconds. It's useful for straightforward dialogue, but it's still weak at precisely the things we've been talking about: the jokes, the tone, the things people mean but don't say. These days I sometimes describe myself less as a translator and more as an editor with strong opinions."

"Last question. What makes a subtitle good?"

"Invisibility. If you finish an episode and can't remember reading anything, if you feel you simply understood the characters, then I've done my job. The best compliment I've ever received came from a friend who watched a series I'd worked on and told me she'd forgotten it wasn't in Spanish."