I feel absolutely honoured to say I had the opportunity to translate, subtitle and transcribe interviews and promotional video content for the World Cup. These interviews ranged from player and coach interviews to interviews of football fans and interviews about art projects surrounding the World Cup.
My biggest surprise was that I didn’t only just translate content from Spanish to English but also transcribed English and on one occasion provided an English to Spanish translation (with the help of AI). Being a native English speaker was in high demand.
This project had its challenges, from very short deadlines to technical vocabulary I, honestly, knew little about as personally I wasn’t a huge fan of football. So I had to learn fast. I read the rules of the game, searched for glossaries and watched numerous interviews of players before and during the World Cup to get up to speed.
I also had to learn a new tool, Happy Scribe, to aid in the transcriptions and translations where AI post-editing was required. This tool while being a decent online editing tool with the usual functions, the AI left little to be desired as it required a lot of editing of hesitations and filler words like ‘like’ and ‘you know’ in which took up most of my time on those tasks.
The actual process of translating was nice and co-operative when human translation was needed as you had the support of a proof-reader proof-reading your translations, almost as you did them. This was to ensure that the subtitles got out in the quickest time possible. Co-ordinators were also quick to reply if you had any issues with the content and were very friendly despite the stress they were under with their long shifts and lack of sleep for some of them.
One project I, actually, swapped roles with the proof-reader as he had a personal commitment to get to quickly and we were given a long 18 minute video to do in a few hours, without prior warning that it was long as most interviews were usually a few minutes, and he felt like he could translate quicker. While that was the case, I completed the timestamps, speaker identification and checked what he had written as well as researching player names as it’s not always easy to hear the names of players pronounced in your second language and understand them. But in the end, we produced a good translation.
I still cannot believe that in less than six months into my translation career that I have took part in such a project covering the largest sporting event in the world but here we are.
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