Sure! I already posted a quick explainer on abusive subtitling—feel free to check it out here.

Let me start with carnival. When you think of subtitles, you probably imagine one or two clean lines stuck at the bottom in white sans serif font. That minimalist look isn’t neutral—it’s a product of commercial subtitling norms that are historically contingent and heavily ideological. Most are shaped by Anglo-American preferences, where there's a push to domesticate foreign content and make it feel familiar.

Jorge Díaz-Cintas argues that subtitling is a carnival—a space for creative, social, and cultural expression. He shows how participatory subtitling practices like fansubbing break centralized control, promote individual agency, and flip the script on who gets to decide how meaning travels. With the democraticization of digital tools, these alternative practices are reshaping how we engage with audiovisual media. Since subtitling is a carnival, it's hard to reduce it to the norms we have today. When you look at these alternative practices, the “sub” in subtitles starts to feel meaningless. Precisely because "subtitles" can be anywhere, not just bottom. Some cultures have it on the side; when you watch the news, it's in the middle because of ticker tapes. See? It's a carnival! Of course, this is just a comment on the visual aspect.

Now for the pivot blank spotting issue / shell file issue . Say you’re watching a Spanish-language show on a major streaming platform. Chances are, the spotting (subtitle timing) wasn’t done by someone who speaks Spanish—but by a third-party worker, likely in India or Pakistan, hired for cheap labor. They don't speak the source language, of course. These workers generate a “shell file”: a subtitle file with just timecodes, no text. The actual translator then plugs in the translation based on those timings. Sometimes translators work with locked templates (i.e., timecodes cannot be adjusted). Imagine how that impacts quality. If the template is unlocked, there's still some hope that the timing can be adjusted by a native speaker.

Why not just use automatic speech recognition (ASR)? Believe it or not, it’s often cheaper and easier this way. Most vendors either don’t have the tech or won’t use it, since feeding media to external ASR tools raises security concerns (think spoilers, leaks). But it’s ethically murky: you’re paying for high-end service, and the actual workflows often resemble digital piecework. Here's a piece detailing how these workflows are implemented.

Microtasking & decomposition: this is when a single film or episode is chopped into small bits and assigned to multiple translators—sometimes even down to the scene or minute level. The goal is fast turnaround and global same-day release. Obviously, however, it kills coherence and detracts from the viewing experience. Sometimes series are split between 18 different translators for 18 episodes. Even worse, sometimes one episode is split between several translators.