Foreign Film Affair

Article Details

Global Watchtower

Common Sense Advisory Blogs

Foreign Film Affair

Posted by Renato S. Beninatto on December 13, 2005 in the following blogs: Translation and Localization, Global Marketing
Pages \| \|

It used to be that little kids outside of the United States grew up with dubbed cartoons and Disney movies and reading subtitles fast enough to go to the movie theater or to watch the latest American TV series on cable was almost a rite of passage.

But this story from the Fast Company Magazine

indicates that looking at the long-term prospects of markets such as China or Russia (where the box-office share for local films nearly tripled, the largest jump of any country) and at the number of movies produced outside the United States, Hollywood studios have begun developing and financing homegrown films instead of just exporting their U.S. productions. This strategy addresses markets like Mexico and India, where 92.5% of the box office goes to local hits.For LSPs, this should be an obvious market to get in, but the tedious times of counting letters and film frames to make sure that subtitles fit and could be read are gone. Now, companies like SDI Media dominate the subtitling market in the U.S. and are expanding to Asia and Central Europe where the entertainment market is booming.Technology has replaced the “craft” work, and even though companies like Herbert Richers in Brazil and Binari Sonori in Italy still play significant roles in the local markets, especially for TV, there is a trend towards consolidation in this space with studios releasing titles the same way as software companies do — multiple languages in the same release date — instead of the traditional approach of letting each market take care of its own translation and dubbing.

Categories