M+E Connections

The localisation industry continues to change and evolve to meet challenges including the COVID-19 pandemic and demands of media and entertainment companies, according to executives from Nexus TV, OOONA and Titles-On.

When Bente Ottersen, CEO of Titles-On, founded that Norway-based localisation and translation company in 2018, it offered 12 languages, she noted during the Localisation breakout panel session “Localisation Perspectives from Downstream” at the Feb. 25 Content Workflow Management Forum. But the number of languages supported has increased to about 30 now, she pointed out.

Titles-On has also added audio services to its core captioning and subtitling services, she said. Whatever services its clients have asked for and needed, it has provided so it has been “very organic growth” at the company, she told viewers.

“It could be quite a challenge to find new, qualified translators in a new language in a hurry but with the recently launched OOONA Poool that has been made very much easier,” she noted. Poool is OOONA’s online service directory for professionals working in the audiovisual localisation industry that helps Language Service Providers (LSPs) and others find qualified translators.

Meeting the Pandemic Challenges

Reflecting back on the start of the global pandemic one year ago, Mattia Fioravanti, client relations manager at Italy-based Nexus TV, said his company, started in 1997, reacted very rapidly. Italy, after all, was one of the first countries to be impacted by COVID-19, he noted.

Nexus TV, which has provided dubbing and post production services for TV shows including Emily in Paris and season four of The Crown, made sure its facility was even more secure, he said.

Technology was available for remote capabilities and “we had the chance to test them,” he said, adding: “We started strategies that would require fewer people [to] be present” at its facility.

However, after about a month in which “talents were reluctant to be present, the situation basically went back to normal” and it stopped using remote recording, he noted.

“Because of the pandemic, we had the possibility to explore the complete variety of the technological equipment that we really weren’t using before,” he said, pointing out that it started to “evaluate different systems – advantages and disadvantages.”

What is missing from remote recording work is “that unique exchange in creative intent when you’re recording,” he said, explaining: “It’s a bit like online theatre. Is it technically proficient? It is. Does it convey the same result in emotions? I tend to say no.”

Meanwhile, when the global lockdown was announced a year ago, “the shock sort of knocked us out for about 30 minutes or so” at Titles-On, Ottersen said. “But once we regained consciousness, we hurried to let our clients know that there would be no disruption in workflow as we already had a remote setup.”

Titles-On also counted on its teams to “reassure” its customers it would continue to provide services to them “because everybody was afraid” at that time, she recalled. “We also made extra backup systems in case of Internet outages or power outages,” she said.

However, apart from those moves, her company didn’t have to make any “revolutionary” changes, she said, noting that it merely “strengthened and enhanced” what it was already doing. It has also developed and acquired some technology that has helped it reduce costs and turnaround time, she said. It also established remote workflows for audio services.

For OOONA, it was mostly “business as usual,” Alex Yoffee, product manager at that company, said, noting that, after all, it was already using a cloud-based platform. After the pandemic began, however, it started to get more customers that wanted to migrate to the cloud.

“We didn’t see any particular difference” in how companies adapted to the pandemic based on their size, he said, noting all companies were affected. Companies relying on on-premise solutions realised they needed to work in the cloud, he said, adding OOONA also saw more activity from freelancers who needed access to its tools so it provided them with weekly subscriptions.

Nexus TV has only worked on new content during the pandemic, not archived material, Fioravanti noted.

Ottersen, on the other hand, said she has seen a lot of demand for archival material. The challenge with using that older content is that clients expect services to be low cost with not a lot of work required, she noted. The reality, however, is that “it would be easier and cheaper to start from scratch with some of these files,” she pointed out.

How 2021 Is Shaping Up

Yoffe’s not sure 2021 will be drastically different than 2020 although he would like it to be so that he can start to travel and see customers again, he said. But he predicted the situation won’t change soon and there are likely another few months in which travel will be avoided. He expects to see more migration to cloud-based workflows in the industry, he also said, adding: “We really see a lot of activity among our customers or our potential customers.” He also hopes to see more content released this year, he noted.

Titles-On, meanwhile, is “making some strategic alignments to meet new market demands,” Ottersen said. “Basically being a small company in this industry can be quite challenging regardless of if there is a crisis or not,” she told viewers, explaining: “The barriers to entry are higher because the landscape changed from local distributors using local vendors to huge global streamers and broadcasters preferring large global vendors as well, so there is a sort of a matching of the small to the small and the big to the big.”

Those challenges “will need constant strategic thinking and manoeuvring and that’s what we are focusing on,” she added.

Although the pandemic remains difficult, “we see a glimmer of hope” now thanks to the vaccines, according to Fioravanti. But he predicted “business as usual” this year for his company.

New Tech Adoption

The three executives predicted that we will see increased use of technologies including artificial intelligence (AI), automated speech recognition (ASR) and machine learning (ML).

ASR represents the biggest change now, said Yoffe, who said a lot of companies are using it in their workflows for transcripts and live captions and are using it in conjunction with post editing because it allows them to reduce cost and time. His company is evaluating different solutions on the market, he said. For machine translation, it is “a little bit hit or miss… but it’s constantly evolving,” he said. ASR engines and cloud-based dubbing “will be most effective” for now and “slowly the machine translation maybe will become more relevant,” he predicted.

Synthetic voice, meanwhile, has already arrived and machine translations are “in the pipeline,” Ottersen noted. Voice cloning is “probably a little but further down the line” but there is “strong financial and economic incentives to push this forward,” she said. She predicted machine translations “will make its way into more workflows” as a tool.

There will continue to be increased pressure on turnaround times and machine translation “will help a lot,” according to Fioravanti.

Advice for the Localisation Sector

“Smaller studios can be a tremendous asset for bigger industrial groups because small companies, like Nexus TV, tend to be “flexible, competitive and quick to respond to any future challenge,” Fioravanti said.

Meanwhile, “as we’re watching the streaming wars evolve, we should all be careful because there will be a huge demand for a short while of localising content, Ottersen said.

However, if “we just jump on that bandwagon, we risk investing [in] a lot of talents that will soon be redundant – so we have to sort of… measure our steps,” she said.

The panel discussion was moderated by David Millar, business development director, Europe at MESA.

Click here to access video of the presentation.

The Content Workflow Management Forum was produced by MESA, the Audio Business Continuity Alliance, Content Localisation Council, Smart Content Council, and the Hollywood IT Society, with sponsorship by Iyuno Media Group, Richey May Technology Solutions, Whip Media Group, Deluxe, Digital Nirvana, Meta, Vubiquity, EIDR, Keywords Studios, Los Angeles Duplication & Broadcasting, Nexus TV, OOONA, Signiant and Titles-On.