by Deborah Wexler<\/p>\n
As an audiovisual translator, the second most frequently asked question I get after, \u201cWow, do you really translate movies and series?\u201d is \u201cHow did you get into that?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n I started at a state channel in Mexico called Imevisi\u00f3n that later became Televisi\u00f3n Azteca. A woman I knew worked there and one day she said to me, \u201cThey are urgently looking for someone who can translate the Italian movie Ladri di biciclette\u2026 by tomorrow!\u201d and I was game. I spent all of that day and night translating the movie and stayed on after that.<\/span><\/p>\n Back then, they didn\u2019t call us \u201caudiovisual translators,\u201d but \u201cmovie translators\u201d (there were no \u201cseries\u201d yet). I worked on paper since there were no subtitling programs available. We would listen to the dialogue on the video, pause it, write the in time and out time, and subtract the in time from the out time to get the duration of the subtitle. Then we would convert that number of frames into spaces, translate the dialogue mentally, count the characters to see if they fit in the space allowed, and write it down with a pencil. There were no spellcheckers available, so the writing had to be perfect from the start. We would take our enormous stack of pages to be typed by the Chyron operator so the subtitles could later be burned into film reels.<\/span><\/p>\n Then I worked for Televisa, Mexico\u2019s leading media company, on the night shift, arriving just in time to see them transitioning from a Moviola to computers and a three-quarter VCR. The Moviola was an editing machine that allowed you to view the film, but the translation and timing were done on paper. The new computers didn\u2019t have a hard drive, so the software (SoftNi, the first PC-based subtitling system) was run through a floppy disk drive in DOS.<\/span><\/p>\n After that, I worked for a bit at PCTV, the largest cable TV distributor in Latin America, until I immigrated to the United States.<\/span><\/p>\n There, I started working for an amazing company called Captions, Inc., where I later became the Director of Translation Services, in charge of over 500 linguists, until it was absorbed by the then start-up Pixelogic Media, which I now call home.<\/span><\/p>\n Somebody once told me, after having heard my laughter while translating a comedy, \u201cPeople shouldn\u2019t be allowed to have so much fun while working!\u201d It was said in jest, but it\u2019s a great way to describe how I feel about this work. I would not want to be doing anything else in the world. It\u2019s what I wished I could do when as a little girl I used to see the translator credit \u201cTranslated by Perla Moctezuma\u201d at the end of subtitled movies on television. I still remember Perla\u2019s name, even though I never got to meet her.<\/span><\/p>\n Although it\u2019s had a few bumps, I like my yellow brick road story because I love where it has taken me. Today it\u2019s taking me to Seoul to train an amazing group of Korean editors in the art of subtitling. Both the typhoon Hinnamnor and I are scheduled to land in Korea tonight.<\/span><\/p>\n I hope you\u2019re inspired by this compilation of stories of how audiovisual translators ended up being a part of this fabulous field. This special edition of Deep Focus<\/em> is dedicated to them.<\/span><\/p>\n by Deborah Wexler As an audiovisual translator, the second most frequently asked question I get after, \u201cWow, do you really translate movies and series?\u201d is \u201cHow did you get into that?\u201d I started at a state channel in Mexico called Imevisi\u00f3n that later became Televisi\u00f3n Azteca. A woman I knew worked there and one day […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14,12,550],"tags":[555,17,20,551,553,554,38,552],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/AVD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1668"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/AVD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/AVD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/AVD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/AVD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1668"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/AVD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1668\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1669,"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/AVD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1668\/revisions\/1669"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/AVD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/AVD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/AVD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nDeborah Wexler<\/span> is an ATA-certified English-to-Spanish translator and editor <\/span>with over 20 years of experience, <\/span>specialized in audiovisual <\/span>translation and Spanish <\/span>orthography. She has translated <\/span>over 6,000 program hours for <\/span>television, VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, <\/span>streaming media and the big screen. She is Manager of Operations of the Americas at Pixelogic Media. She is also a freelance audiovisual translator and quality control specialist. She is the Administrator of the ATA’s Audiovisual Division and a frequent speaker at international conferences, and she is an educator who has mentored and trained many translators. <\/span>Contact: <\/span>debbiesantos@yahoo.com<\/a><\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"