World Cup Fever

At Red Bee Media, we’re used to live subtitling large volumes of sport, and football in particular, but the World Cup presents unique challenges – the global nature of the event means presenters and commentators may mention players, place names and football clubs that we may have never heard of before. If you watch one of Nigeria’s games, for example, you could expect to hear about their defender Juwon Oshaniwa – and the commentator might also mention that he plays for Israeli team FC Ashdod. Some tricky words there for the unprepared, and given the high-profile nature of the World Cup where even a lower-key group game pulls millions of viewers, we need to be prepared for every eventuality. It’s vital that our deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers don’t miss out on a moment of the analysis.

So, how do we gear up for an event like the World Cup?

We prepare a guide to every single team in action at the World Cup for our subtitlers to swot up on. Every subtitler needs to train the names of all of the players into their voice recognition system, taking special care if we need to just say the surname. So when Germany’s record-breaking goalscorer, Miroslav Klose, narrowly misses the goal, we need to be wary of the punning commentator’s observation, “Could Klose be any closer with that shot?” We also need to be ready for the tactical scrutiny in the studio, so that our viewers can know their tiki-taka from their catenaccio.

But when you’re dealing with football punditry, we can’t possibly be ready for everything. In Australia’s game against the Netherlands, Tim Cahill’s magnificent volley off the crossbar was described as ‘Van Basten-esque’ by more than one commentator. As good as our voice recognition software is, it will struggle with a phrase like ‘Van Basten-esque’ – but with a bit of forethought and our World Cup preparation guide at the ready, the subtitler will have anticipated that Dutch great Marco Van Basten might get a mention. We also have special voice commands, called macros, that can attach suffixes like ‘-esque’ to words. And if the commentator is determined to go completely off-piste and just invent new words, we can type them into a text box – then every time that word is mentioned, we can send it to air using one of our special macros.

Something we can prepare for, though, are the national anthems. We took a decision for this World Cup to provide the words for each country’s national anthem, so that the viewer can understand what is being sung (and sing along, if they so choose!). Sometimes the choice of what words we use can be contentious, and there’s a serious editorial decision to be made. What of Switzerland, where there are four official languages, and four different verses to their anthem that you can sing? In the end we followed Alan Hansen’s timeless advice and played percentages – 64% of the Swiss speak German as their first language, so we went with the German version.

It’s been an exciting and unpredictable World Cup so far, with goals and talking points aplenty. Even England’s early exit hasn’t dampened football fever! By the time it all comes to an end at the Maracana on July 13, Red Bee Media will have subtitled more than 150 hours of live World Cup coverage, not to mention the wide variety of documentaries and comedy programmes that tie in to the summer festival of football.

Graham Spencer, Subtitler.