Subtitling the Eisteddfod

The Eisteddfod, however, presents its own unique challenges in being a live programme many parts of which are extremely difficult to subtitle live, and not just because they’re in Welsh.

What is the Eisteddfod? To Eisteddfod-goers, it’s an annual festival of music, literature, theatre and so on, held in the first week of August on a Maes (field) in a different part of Wales every year. This year’s is being held in Denbighshire. It’s televised by BBC Wales and broadcast on S4C, Wales’s Welsh language TV channel. It’s basically a series of competitions, with the final three of each category making the stage. It has a heavy druidic influence, with a ‘Gorsedd’ of druids performing ceremonies and presiding over the chairing and crowning of bards and writers during the week. There are harps, flowing costumes, dancing maidens and fanfares a-plenty!

For subtitlers, it’s nine days (the ‘week’ encompasses both weekends) of usually some nine to ten hours of live output a day. It’s a bit like subtitling an endless Celtic X Factor, breaking only for Newyddion (the national News), which we also cover live. There are competitions in every conceivable musical category – Under 12 Solo, Male Solo age 12-16, Female Solo age 12-16, Male Solo 16-19, Female Solo 16-19, Operatic Solo 19-25, Over 25 competitions for Soprano, Mezzo-soprano, Contralto, Countertenor, Tenor, Baritone and Bass. Apply the same to choirs, brass bands, duets, recitation, visual arts, drama, poetry, folk songs and all kinds of instruments. There are competitions for all forms of writing – short stories, novels, dramas, monologues, dialogues, narratives, novels – and poetry. I could go on…

It would be foolish to attempt to simultaneously translate and respeak some flowery prose, an archaic folk song or an operatic aria live on air so we spend the weeks running up to the Eisteddfod translating hundreds of songs ready to cue them out. The set pieces are easy to get hold of as they’re listed and published by the Eisteddfod Office. The self selections are more problematic. Some competition entrants submit their pieces to the Eisteddfod Office in good time and we’re able to put them on our database. Others simply don’t submit their entries and that’s where our two runners on the Maes come in. They work closely with the production team to obtain late submissions and basically have to make pests of themselves, loitering backstage, taking bits of paper or sheet music out of nervous competitors’ hands and photographing them to email back to the subtitling team for translation and cueing. They also obtain edited clips and VTs from the production team to the same end.

I find the BBC Wales production office on the Maes really quite remarkable. Three weeks before the Eisteddfod, it’s a green field with cows and their pats. By the time we get there on the Friday before the opening ceremony, there is a production room with around 40 PCs linked to the BBC network, there are studios, editing suites and OB trucks ready to transmit all these hours of live TV.

We start planning with the production team around two months before the Eisteddfod, arranging the technical set up of line feeds, etc. Once we have the first draft schedule, we can start planning our rotas. For the Cardiff team, Eisteddfod week really is very demanding and without each member pulling together and going beyond the call of duty, we wouldn’t make it. To cover the output we need four people who are all contributing to the live broadcast at the same time. We have one person cueing out the pre-prepared subtitles, one respeaking the studio chat, one editor, pulling our prepped items from the database for cueing and monitoring the running order, and one person directing. Then we have another two or three subtitlers in other rooms, translating the last minute pieces ready for cueing and two more at the Maes frantically chasing those pieces and sending them to Cardiff. Thankfully, there are ad breaks on S4C so we get a chance to catch our breath!

Now every year we try and improve a bit on the previous year’s coverage. And I think we manage to achieve that to a lesser or greater extent. Some years we make a small but significant leap, like the year we started to use digital cameras to photograph pieces backstage instead of having to photocopy them and FAX them, or the first year we had the shared drive so we didn’t have to FTP cut items any more.

We’re just past halfway through the 2013 Eisteddfod as I write this and I can say, while touching wood, that so far we have bested previous years. There hasn’t been one item yet we haven’t had the words for – and this is largely thanks to the all help and cooperation of the Eisteddfod Office. By the time you read this, though, we’ll all be hanging up our microphones and looking forward to heading to Llanelli for Eisteddfod 2014.

Branwen Tucker, Subtitling Production Manager (Cardiff), Access Services.