How subtitlers make movies more inclusive

From navigating cultural nuances to fighting an industry that still does not fully understand its significance, subtitling in India is an arduous road

How can words be crafted such that they can be elevated from the language that constrains them? 

When he won a historic best director Oscar for Parasite at the 92nd Academy Awardsin 2020, Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-Ho famously said in his acceptance speech that once you “overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.” This was widely interpreted as a subtle dig to a wide cross-section of the American audience who detest subtitles and so, by default, remain isolated from world cinema. 

In India, though, subtitles give us hope. As a country where English is not our first language, we are largely drawn towards the comfort of subtitles. It structures our movie-viewing experience instead of marring it. Most schools encourage their students to watch PG-rated American and British films with subtitles to hone their English-speaking skills. For instance, this platform, primarily used by aspirants preparing for various exams, lists 10 films to watch in order to improve their English. In the English-speaking academies lining the neon-hued alleys of Karol Bagh and Paharganj in Delhi or the suburbs in Mumbai, films and shows with subtitles is the “practical” extension to the rote learning of “theory” in class. 

But what does it take to produce even a single line of a subtitle on our screens? Languages are not so pliable, as anyone studying or working in a foreign country or state will tell you. For a Tamil friend working in Noida, who doesn’t speak or understand Hindi, navigating the dusty lanes of this satellite city comes with its own challenges—from that annoying autorickshaw driver to the moody metro cop. 

In a country with over 22 scheduled languages recognised by the Constitution, how do Indian subtitlers cross the hurdles of hyperlocal humour, or sociocultural references that are so niche that no translation will convey its essence—and all this within just seconds on the screen? 

The brass tacks  

There are two main types of subtitles—open and closed captions. Open captions are burned into the video and cannot be turned off. Closed captions can be turned on or off by the viewer. Subtitles are typically encoded in a specific format, such as SubRip (.srt), WebVTT (.vtt), or Timed Text Markup Language (.ttml). Each format has its own syntax and rules for timing, styling and other features. They may need to be edited or revised to correct errors, improve readability or ensure accuracy. This may involve adjusting timing, changing the wording or reformatting text. 

It goes without saying that the subtitler manually needs to sync the subtitles with the dialogues on the screen. There are various softwares that can make this process more seamless. Final Cut Pro is a professional video-editing software for Mac that includes built-in tools for creating and editing subtitles and captions. Adobe Premiere Pro is another professional video-editing software that includes a built-in captioning tool that allows users to create and edit subtitles and captions directly in the timeline. There are various, open-source platforms, too, such as Jubler, Aegisub, Subtitle Edit and more. 

Linguist Noam Chomsky based his theory of language acquisition on the idea that all languages contain similar structures and rules (what he calls a “universal grammar”) and the fact that children everywhere acquire language the same way, and without much effort, seems to indicate that we're born wired with the basics already present in our brains. 

Rules of the game

In India, subtitling a film or a series comes with its own set of rules. Chomsky’s universal grammar holds no power here. With every film, every scene, the context may change. “The best way to describe our job is that it is a kind of adaptation, so we are adapting a certain language and making it accessible,” says Jahan Singh Bakshi, who has subtitled over scores of films and series such as Chhapaak, Netflix’s Sacred Games and Shershaah among others. “All languages don’t function the same way and there is no right or wrong way of doing it.” 

Bakshi explains that if there’s a local joke on wordplay, there is no way you can replace that with a literal translation. This joke, then, needs to be adapted to the language of the subtitle, whilst still retaining the essence of the original joke. He illustrates this with the example of dialogue from the Vidya Balan-starrer Shakuntala Devi. 

“There was a tongue-twister about the tail and hump of a camel, a scene that is basically a retort to the English tongue-twister of Betty Butter,” he explains. “Initially, the instinct was not to translate it but the director’s brief was to at least retain the camel, and I made up a new tongue-twister: Crazy camel calms camels, the camel clans clashed. It’s silly but fun. This happens all the time with humour because more often than not the jokes in Indian films are based on wordplay that cannot be literally translated.”

Translating culture 

Varsha Bharath runs a company Babelfin with her partner Vikram in Chennai. From working on the subtitles of Tamil films to other bilingual and trilingual films, Varsha and Vikram also translate Tamil scripts to English for studio executives in Mumbai to understand the film before greenlighting it. 

As with the Hindi films that Bakshi has worked on, things remain the same for Tamil films, too. Varsha says that it took her a long time to understand that she was literally translating the word ‘brother’ which is used casually by everyone down south. To the Western audience, someone calling a shopkeeper “brother” was confusing because they would actually assume the shopkeeper is a real brother to the character. 

“There is a considerable loss in translation and as an industry we’re still learning how to subtitle. A lot of films have subtitles that are too straight and crisp which makes it look very hygienic,” she says. 

Another example that Varsha shares is that of ‘cousin marriage’ which is prevalent in some cultures of south India. A literal translation of such a marriage in English may make it seem incestuous and awkward. “So it depends on the case. If it’s a passing dialogue, I do away with the context and just call them ‘fiancé’. But if that marriage forms the essence of the film, I’ll explain it. There is only so much word space we have so that it doesn’t affect the readability, too.”

In the 2022 film Kaathuvaakula Rendu Kaadhal starring Vijay Sethupathi, Nayanthara and Samantha, which Varsha subtitled, there were such challenges involving wordplay because the film employs a very specific kind of humour that is quintessential to the style of the director Vignesh Shivan. The widely acclaimed film Visaranai by Vetrimaaran (The Interrogation) highlighted police brutality in Tamil Nadu, the subtitles had to strike a fine balance between the pathos on screen while still providing adequate context about the realities of custodial police torture in India. 

Nuances of language 

Rekhs, a veteran subtitler, is widely credited for redefining the art of subtitling—even rhyming the songs in translation and making them read poetic. With an experience of over 12 years, Rekhs has worked with the stalwarts of Indian cinema, from Mani Ratnam to Goutam Ghose to Shankar. 

“Just like how the texture, the pattern and colour makes up designing clothes, similarly, there is texture and an inner layer to subtitles,” she says. “So if it’s a village story, the kid will not call his parents ‘mom’ and ‘dad’ in the subtitles but rather ‘Ma’ and ‘Pa’ or I will retain the regional words for ‘mother’ and ‘father’ and the audience will understand and accept it.”

Rekhs is also part of a WhatsApp group for the hearing impaired that helped her understand how they make sense of subtitles. “I understood that the double apostrophe in the subtitle connotes that it’s a song and the single apostrophe is the mind’s voice, or it’s a person not in the frame talking. So I’ve collected information like this and cultivated my own style.”

Almost all the subtitlers we spoke to for this story, including Rekhs, agree that the rules established by OTT platforms for subtitles are either arbitrary or unjust. There is no standardisation of subtitles in India and this makes it an open ground for studios to run roughshod over subtitles. 

Vivek Ranjit, who has worked on more than 220 films, says that there have been cases when he has worked on the subtitles for a film and when it was released on an OTT platform, entire sections and dialogues have been changed without his consent. It wouldn’t hurt if these changes were minimal but they are often outright incorrect. 

“If I have to give you an example from Singham, which is not my film, one OTT platform has translated the word ‘sher’ to ‘tiger’ and the other has translated it correctly to ‘lion’. What can one say? This happens to my films on a particular OTT platform all the time. Recently, I called them out on Twitter for a film where my subtitles were completely butchered. Only then did they change it. Often, they don’t, and we have no redressal,” he says. 

Ranjit and Varsha both say that some filmmakers don’t even take into the fact that the movie needs to be subtitled in the first place. The result? They expect subtitlers to finish the movie within 48-72 hours, as opposed to a week or two. And despite all that it takes to get even a single film right, it should surprise no one that wordsmiths, regardless of which field they are in, continue to be severely underpaid. The world of Indian subtitles is no different. 

On an average, an Indian subtitler earns anywhere between ₹35,000 to a lakh per film. Ranjit says that he hasn’t hiked his rate even once because there are scores of people ready to subtitle a film for even ₹10,000—this is based on the interviews conducted for this story. Rekhs believes that if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys and that there have been cases where a filmmaker has hired a subtitler for a low remuneration, only to realise that they have royally botched it up, eventually going to Rekhs who had to redo it all over again. 

More often than not, the payments don’t come through, and this is the case not with low-budget indie films but films made in hundreds of crores. Rekhs herself had to wait for more than ten months to get remunerated for the Rajnikanth-starrer 2.0, the sequel for Robot. “I’ve given so much of my time and life to this profession. I have a team, too. I can’t stop paying them just because 2.0 didn’t pay me, right? Ultimately, after all the media pressure, they had to pay me.”

At the end of it, subtitlers have hope for the evolution of the profession. While Artificial Intelligence (AI) threatens to eat up their job and the fears linger, Indian subtitlers are steadfast in their belief that the very genesis of a subtitle is based on the human gaze. If it was just a matter of translation, perhaps an AI tool would’ve stepped in years ago and made their jobs redundant. 

Words hold landscapes within them. Our subtitlers help us unfold these landscapes of worlds alien to us—one frame at a time.

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