Subtitle Underground
I am not surprised anymore when I find people watching movies from 1-JD DVD stores even before they are screened in Hollywood. How the hell does Hammoudeh get their hands on them? What I find less surprising, now that I think about it, is that these movies are instantly subtitled. Even before their screening in Hollywood. Freaky, eh?
Cool article on Wired on torrent subtitling.
Here’s an excerpt:
Like other online obsessives, translators band together. Lilia Carone, a 38-year-old Italian with a PhD in English literature, got her start in 2004 translating The Best of Youth, an Italian miniseries, into English. These days, she also helps run Subscene.com, a hub for torrent subtitlers and videos translated into everything from Danish to Turkish. The hottest language: Arabic. Demand is so great that at least one Syrian translator, Tarafa Alkaddah, can actually earn an illicit living off popular US movies and TV shows. Using English that he says he learned watching television, Alkaddah creates Arabic-subbed versions and sells them to distributors in Damascus and Saudi Arabia. Censors or no, the DVDs show up in markets throughout the Middle East. It’s cultural subversion, one episode of Everybody Loves Raymond at a time.
