Microsoft Corporation (SubPLY Inc)

‘Thanks again for working closely with us on all projects and requests.’ 

Successfully translated, transcribed and captioned large bulk of information for a series of projects – 38 languages, a total of 10,000+ minutes captioned – for one of the major captioning and subtitling companies.

Background
With annual revenues of more than $32 billion, Microsoft Corporation is more than the largest software company in the world: it is a cultural phenomenon.

Microsoft is an IT company that develops operating systems for computers and smartphones. The company also develops software, video game consoles, and computer hardware (mice, keyboards). For many years, Microsoft has been developing its cable television business with the American channel NBC. Microsoft is also present on the Internet with Internet Explorer and the Bing search engine.

Microsoft Corporation is a multinational corporation with over 90,000 employees in more than 190 countries around the world.

Project Summary

• Type of Project: Captioning, subtitling, translation.
• Languages: Japanese, Polish, Turkish, Dutch, Czech, Polish, Russian, Hebrew, Thai, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Italian, Ukrainian, Romanian, Hungarian, Greek, Mandarin, Hindi, Indonesian, Bengali, Punjabi, Filipino, Swahili, Amharic, Yoruba, Oromo, Hausa, Shona, Kinyarwanda, Estonian, Finnish, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Slovak, Swedish, Vietnamese
• Industry: Captioning and Subtitling company
• Volume: One project for Japanese captioning - 5298 minutes. Multiple tasks for Turkish captioning - 2563 minutes in total and Polish captioning - 1431 minutes in total. 
• Deadlines: Usually 5-6 days
• PoliLingua’s customer since June 16, 2019

Project features
The abundance of TV shows and series led to the urgency in translating the content and opened a Pandora’s Box in the world of translation. It highlighted the conflict between professional and amateur work in the attractive audiovisual market, but also the current difficulties that translators face dealing with the rise of new technologies.

As a result, the chances of finding subtitling errors are greater, regardless of the source. The first to pay the price for these errors are, as always, the viewers.

Our partners from Microsoft accepted the challenge by taking the lead role in making captions and subtitles great again. With our help they delivered captioning, subtitling, translation of the highest quality that can satisfy even the most meticulous of viewers.

As a result, our collaboration turned out to be a win not only for its active participants but for all the TV viewing public who are not ready to compromise the quality for the first-up-first-served standards of the online world.

Challenges

For the Japanese project with the volume of 5298 minutes, we had a pretty tight deadline - 12 days. We had to assign 12 linguists to work on the project

When it comes to tight deadlines and heavy workload, we always fall back on the tactics of team play. It has nothing to do with hooks, pucks, footballs, hoops or goals (well, not those sports goals at least). It calls for a team of experts in their field to share the work task and deliver results within the timescale agreed.

Repeatedly the tactics paid off only strengthening our conviction in the importance of having well-established teams of professionals who can trust each other and perform their part of a work on schedule, to an accomplished standard, and any day of the week.

There were situations when, for different reasons, we could have problems with TAT

As professionals, we always must meet certain quality standards in terms of spelling, grammar, typography or number of characters. And when a problem arises, we strive to find a way to solve it – as quickly as possible and without complicating the matter.

Project Highlights
Yes, the image quality could be 4K, but what about the translation? When you watch the adventures of your favorite star who looks good but speaks as if they just began studying English a few weeks ago, doesn’t it ruin your movies experience making it less enjoyable?

Sometimes, the chase after the new content is favoured at the expense of involvement, planning and the number of workers involved. To meet demanding deadlines, important steps are overlooked, such as adapting puns or cultural references or technical problems such as synchronizing the image with the text.

To tackle this issue, we signed up a team of professional translators, who were in charge or translating, subtitling and captioning the entire project. Gained the necessary information about the plot intricacies and the speech nuisances, our linguists spent less time on the following phases of the project. Thus, we met the deadlines and achieved the best level of quality in the circumstances.

Solution summary

• Carried out the project on time 
• Established very trusting relationship both with the client and the project participants
• Achieved the impressive quality of translation, captioning and subtitling on a tight schedule
• Assigned a team of very experienced and creative linguists to the translation
• Improved time-management and interpersonal skills