Friday, January 22, 2016

Importance of Translation in Hollywood

These days you can find sub-titles in every other movie. This is due to the high demand of people coming from different backgrounds. People of different cultures who speak different languages are also interested in the same subject.

 For example, Hollywood movies either come up with subtitles or offer debut in different languages so that people across the world can watch the same movie on the day of opening. It is not limited to people who are familiar with English. Subtitles option is more effective than dubbing.

There are certain rules of subtitles that every translator has to keep in mind. There should be maximum two lines in a screen at a time. Second is that, every line should have maximum of 37 characters. It cannot exceed that limit as it will affect the reading speed of the audience.


With translation Hollywood movies earn millions as it gets a larger market to cater. According to a research, only 10% of people in the world speak English. There are many non-English speaking countries, where there is a demand of Hollywood movies. These movies have a good base and a strong subject to talk about, which these non-English audience is interested in. 

Hence there is a large opportunity for producers to reach out to a larger market rather than catering to only U.S. with the help of translation services film makers are able to earn more than three times of what they are currently earning.  With the help of translation agencies in India, this task has become comparably easier.

Translation can be done in two ways; subtitles and dubbing. Many of them do not prefer the later one as the mouth and the dialogues do not match with the speaker. There are few movie makers in Hollywood who do not prefer subtitles as it becomes difficult for the reader to read continuously and watch the speaker at the same time. An average reader can read nine characters per second, so it is important for the translator to adjust the dialogue in that required space.

There are many good translation services in India, who will do English translation in every language spoken in India. They do translate Hollywood movies into Hindi and make it meaningful. The quality of translation plays an important role as; the translators need to have a good movie background. 

They should maintain the integrity of the dialogue without making it look funny. There are movies which have lost their charm during the translation process. If done elegantly, it will help movie makers to not only bridge their bank accounts but also open doors for a larger market.


Although Hollywood is the most profitable film industry, India is the most productive based on its sheer number of films. Its gross recipes have tripled from 2004 to 2014 and have estimated revenue to reach $4.5 billion. 

With these numbers it has become important for Hollywood to translate and get the Indian audience as well. As Hollywood makes the most expensive films, it is important for them to cater to a larger market to get good profits. For this, thus it has become important for them to translate and cater to larger audience.
TransLang Ways is leading translation company in India and we provide quality translation services in India for documentaries, movies, biographies, Interviews etc. 

4 comments:

  1. The quality of the translation in subtitles varies greatly. It is very common to see big-budget HOllywood films with terrible subtitles, where it is obvious that the translator did not understand the meaning of what is being said. For example, yesterday I saw a movie and they transalted Geneva into Spanish as Génova (Genoa, Italy). They got the city and country wrong.
    Sometimes if the movie is not very interesting I end up critizing the subtitles instead of concentrating on the movie.

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  2. Very nice blog post. Thanks for sharing such helpful blog post. Keep posting in future also.
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