Outsourcing's Next "Victims": Deaf People

[OhioChick]

04:45 PM ET, Mar 20, 2007

Somebody has to write those subtitles that allow the hearing impaired to watch movies. Increasingly, that work is being outsourced to India--with some unintentionally hilarious consequences.

According to UPI, professional subtitlers in the UK are up in arms over the outsourcing of their jobs to low paid workers in India. They're also complaining that the trend is resulting in substandard work.

For example, in the movie My Super Ex-Girlfriend, Uma Thurman utters the line "We have a zero-tolerance policy for (sexual harassment)."

But as rendered by Indian workers, the line reads like it's from a Borat movie: "We hold the highest standards for sexual harassment by foreign workers."

It reminds me of the time I watched the movie Airplane in a French language theater in Montreal. One particularly graphic scene in the film shows human, uh, waste, hitting a fan.

I was the only one laughing at this rather obvious sight gag because it represented an English expression for which there is no equivalent in French.

The point is, translations that don't take into account cultural differences in order to accurately convey not just words, but meanings, are bound to fail.

http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2007/03/outsourcings_ne.html

[Deja Q]

1. All your base are belong to us.

When will this offshoring shit ever end?

And, no shit sherlock, that the quality of the work is lower - it's pretty friggin' universal and it shows. Maybe that's why some of it's starting to come back...

[OhioChick]

2. I think that companies are beginning

to see that you get what you pay for.