Birdseeding

What's it like trying to fall asleep in microgravity? Is it easy or difficult to adjust to mentally?

One thing I think we do so differently to your average SRT-based home anime subtitler is that we're bound by a bunch of principles that constrain what we can write, like:

• Reading speed - this is huge. We constantly shorten things in order to make even slow readers be able to get what's being said. A lot of people who use TV subtitles are older and often hard of hearing, and they need subtitles that keep a very moderate pace. Two full lines of text? They need to be on screen for six seconds. That's not negotiable.

• Line length and line breaks - we spend a lot of time on dividing lines into easy to read units, and work to technical standards that limit how many characters each line can have.

• language choices, like having a totally consistent way of writing every word and term, across entire languages and at the very least entire series of TV shows.

(And of course better QC and stuff. But you knew that.)

Haha, we actually did Gilmore Girls during our training, for precisely that reason. You watch, try, fail, cry a little and then remove half the jokes.

Well, so far the YouTube autogenerated subtitles are... well... you've seen them. But it's a fast-improving field for sure. I'm fully convinced that within a decade 90% of the jobs in the industry will have gone. It's one of the reasons I'm getting out.

Once or twice, although relatively rarely, I've been given huge stage plays to translate, for those "live from the National Theatre" type screenings that a lot of cinemas do. One of them was the first three-hour part of Tony Kushner's Angels in America, which was truly a lot of fun to work with - it's steeped in history, gay politics and mormon theology (!) and it was a lot of fun to research and deliver. Like a lot of things, we're given way, way too little time to finish the project, so I had to very quickly understand, get a feel for, collate and quality check a very long play. It was hard, but I'd totally do it again.

Not blockbuster films, no, at least not personally. But definitely some major television shows. As you might guess, security and non-disclosure around them are pretty high.