Introducing Netflix Timed Text Authoring Lineage
Dubbing and subtitling are inherently creative processes. At Netflix, we strive to make shows as joyful to watch in every language as in the original language, whether a member watches with original or dubbed audio, closed captions, forced narratives, subtitles or any combination they prefer. Capturing creative vision and nuances in translation is critical to achieving this goal. Creating a dub or a subtitle is a complex, multi-step process that involves:
Script files are the essence and the driving force in the localization workflow. They carry dialogue, timecodes and other information as they travel from one tool to another to be transcribed, translated, and adapted for performance by voice artists. Dub scripts, Audio Description, Forced Narratives, Closed Captions, and Subtitles all need to be authored in complex tools that manage the timing, location, and formatting of the text on screen.
Currently, scripts get delivered to Netflix in various ways — Microsoft Word, PDF, Microsoft Excel, Rich Text files, etc., to name a few. These carry crucial information such as dialogues, timecodes, annotations, and other localization contexts. However, the variety of these file formats and inconsistent way of specifying such information across them has made efforts to streamline the localization workflow unattainable in the past.
