Those are good points, but I would say that there can be just as much interpretation and "semantic" translation for a book, especially one heavy with dialogue. Outside of dialogue, metaphors and other "imagery" language is not easy to translate, and does not entail a simple word shift.

The latter part of ACs comment didn't warrant a response. I took it to be rhetorical and obviously sarcastic.

Well, it would be illegal for you to write a novel based closely on a film, yes.

Hehe... thanks. They outsource their sub origination and conforming, so it's likely that one of their vendors did this to cut costs. Competition has been fierce in this sector over the last few years with the onset of services like Netflix in non-English territories.

That's not a very substantive answer.

When I was in school, I read scripts of plays. Seems analogous to a script of a movie. I agree that there is definitely more value to having a visual performance as well as the script, but the script is not valueless, and I don't see why the creator/owner of that script should not have a copyright claim to it.

Just because somebody does something for free doesn't mean it has no (or little) cost.

I agree with your argument that a civil union that is equal under law to marriage is equal in it's application. However, the name does carry weight, and calling something that is equal in every respect by a different name marginalizes it.

For example, suppose we called immigrants who have gained citizenship "Legal Immigrants," while calling people born in the country "citizens." Under law, we say that a "Legal Immigrant" is exactly the same as a "Citizen," but we just call them something else. This has the effect of stigmatizing the Legal Immigrant, and even if by law they are the same, many people will view them as different, which is a problem.

Also, the clerical and legal challenges involved in updating the entirety of the legal code at Federal, State and Local levels would not be insignificant.

The FCC release new regulations regarding Closed Captioning last year. The rollout schedule is a bit confusing, but the basic gist is that any content that was broadcast over the air or cable/satellite with CCs must also have CCs when it is distributed over IP (e.g. Netflix, Amazon Instant, iTunes). I *think* that after 2015 or 2016, all content distributed over IP must have CCs.

Well, it's not "entirely fan-made." The person who made it based their translation on the dialogue of the movie.

Perhaps true, but actually preposterous.

Source? I would be very interested to learn more about this.

Are you saying that content owners are charging more per unit in the non-English territories? I'm not aware of that being the case (though I'm on the B2B end of the business, so I'm not intimately familiar with consumer prices), other than cases where there is a supply and demand difference.

From the cost side, it does cost extra money to prepare content of international release (e.g. standards conversion, censorship editing, subtitling), but in the grand scheme of things, these costs are probably not material (i.e. less than $50k per title). When you start talking about dubbing, things get a lot more expensive.

The costs can be prohibitive for smaller markets. If you have a language with only a few million speakers, your content has to have a much wider appeal before it makes sense to distribute to that territory. You'll see Avengers translated to Swedish, but you're not likely to see a small budget film like Fun Size, especially if it failed at the US box office.

How does transcribing dialogue from a movie, translating it, and publishing the result differ from translating a book and publishing the result?

The post production company I work for contracts with a vendor whose business model is to originate closed captions by crowd sourcing. Basically you get paid per minute of video you transcribe via their web portal.

In fact, all of our subtitle translation work is done via contracting, so there is opportunity for fansubbers to get paid for their work.