"So we just make a remark: 'This is a general in the Civil War.' " Han takes out a laptop and shows a translation from an episode of Heroes that mentions Robert E. Part of what makes those subtitles better is that they explain references to American culture and history.
"We're not just making subtitles we're making better subtitles." "We are concerned that every character gets his own personality," says Han. Han says they take those scripts and turn them into creative Chinese translations.
The captioned scripts are the raw material. Then they find closed-captioned scripts in English those also turn up online shortly after the show airs.
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Han says they can download untranslated versions of the American shows from the peer-to-peer file-sharing site BitTorrent as soon as 10 minutes after new episodes air in the U.S. They give only their screen names - Han Xian and Liang Liang. Two of them agreed to talk with NPR at a brand-new, latte-serving cafe in Shanghai. The subtitles are created by other China-based fans of American television. Yao speaks only a little English, but he's able to watch these programs because he downloads them from a Web site where the latest episodes turn up with regularity - and with Chinese subtitles. Unfortunately for Yao, the Chinese government will not allow American companies to broadcast their shows on Chinese television. "I like that kind of culture, and I like that kind of lifestyle better," Yao says in Chinese as he excitedly watches the opening scenes.
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He's a big Lost fan - he's just downloaded the latest episode - and he prefers American TV to Chinese television. In a den on the second floor sits the center of Yao's home entertainment: a desktop computer with a high-speed Internet connection. Yao lives 45 minutes from the center of Shanghai, in a newly minted gated community of prefab townhouses. Yao Jun prefers to get his entertainment on the Internet, where he can find the shows he likes almost immediately after they've aired in the U.S. He sells an entire season of the ABC program Lost for seven yuan - about $1.īut in Shanghai's most upscale neighborhoods, there's no reason to pay even that much. In the French Concession district of Shanghai, from behind a table piled high with DVDs, one such vendor laments that his business isn't going very well. Downloading has become so popular, that it's even cutting into the profits of vendors who sell pirated DVDs. More than 200 million Chinese now have access to American TV online, for example. Although the Chinese government does a good job of censoring political content online, it's been more lax about cultural matters. A screen grab from, where an army of volunteers creates Chinese-subtitled versions of English-language TV shows - within hours of their initial broadcast stateside.Ĭhina now has more people on the Internet than any other nation.