Chapter 7. Subtitling in transition

One of the largest projects of volunteer subtitling is the TED Talk Translators programme, with more than 3000 talks subtitled in 115 languages, the programme has been constantly adapting to respond to the increasing popularity of TED Talks with a robust quality assurance process, training material and adoption of tools. In this work, we pose the question of whether this constant transition and refinement of the workflows has an effect on the quality of the subtitles and their adequacy. Our corpus-based investigation using subtitling and linguistic features provides evidence in favour of a chronological transition from a “plain” translation of the source transcript, which does not consider subtitling constraints, to well-formed subtitles.