10/15/2021
ATRAE is taking a stand against post-editing by urging the major audiovisual platforms to eliminate such practices. The International Association of Professional Translators and Interpreters (IAPTI) endorses ATRAE’s statement, and translated it into English to reach the international T&I community.
ATRAE States its View on Post-Editing
The Spanish Audiovisual Translation and Adaptation Association, ATRAE, is taking a stand against post-editing by urging the major audiovisual platforms to eliminate such practices and thereby stop damaging a sector that is already vulnerable.
We are shocked and dumbfounded to learn that Squid Game, the series that has been topping the most viewed series on Netflix, with hundreds of reviews mentioning its quality, has been subtitled using post-edited machine translation.
As translators, we simply cannot understand how this series, or any other audiovisual production, could be left to a translation algorithm, a method that guarantees deficient results that must subsequently be corrected by a language professional who receives only a paltry fee.
Clearly, this is yet another turn of the screw contributing to the sector’s precarious situation. Translators now not only have to put up with intermediaries skimming off colossal percentages from the amounts paid by distributors, but they must also bear seeing the lion’s share of available work assigned to machine platforms, after which the inevitably poor results are handed anyway to a human post-editor, who must do what the software is incapable of doing—but for a considerably lower fee than he or she would have made for doing this translation properly from the outset.
This news has emerged at the same time that Netflix is raising its subscriber fees, making it even more galling that they are introducing such cutbacks in the translation of their productions, while fattening their profits in detriment to the quality of the content they are selling at higher prices to their customers.
ATRAE urges distributors, including Netflix, to talk with their providers to learn why they should stop using post-edited machine translation and trust human translators’ expertise, which is generally excellent and in great supply. This is the only way their productions can provide viewers with the quality they deserve and pay for. Otherwise, the only possible outcome is poor results that will inevitably undermine their reputation, customer base and revenues. In other words, an ever more deficient service that simultaneously harms the translation sector is a formula that trades short-term gain for long-term pain.
We also encourage the customers of Netflix (and other distributors), who diligently pay a monthly service fee, to let these firms know their displeasure regarding the low quality of content translation—be it publicly (through the social media, etc.) or by making use of the “Report a problem” option in their Netflix account’s “Viewing activity” tab.
The ATRAE board
