Language on Screen: Globalization, Localization, and the Entertainment Industry

The Importance of Linguistic and Cross-cultural Solutions for Entertainment

In the past few years, the entertainment industry has reinvented itself considerably. Using social media like no other sector, and implementing cross-platform solutions that make their products more accessible, and fit the fast-paced lifestyle of their audiences.

These changes have also allowed the industry to reimagine its transnational operations. Platforms like Netflix or Amazon Prime distribute content on a global scale, while also joining forces with local producers to create material for each of their target locales.

A new series or movie will most likely be streamed on Netflix and heavily promoted on social media. Through social media, the industry creates strong ties between the audience, the product, and its creators. This isn’t that complicated if all of those involve speak the same language and we have an expert marketing team. But, what if that’s not the case?

Contemporary entertainment is global, diverse, and mostly online. Having a multilingual and cross-cultural presence is essential.

Subtitling and dubbing are crucial to make a product accessible to foreign audiences. But they’re not the end-all, be-all of expansion. Marketing efforts should be targeted as well. And sometimes, the material itself has to be revised to meet local tastes and regulations.

Despite all the experience the entertainment industry has in these matters, sometimes things don’t go so well. Even if we’re just covering dubbing and subtitling. In recent years, world-class releases have been poorly dubbed or subtitled. Maybe as a consequence of not understanding the target audience deeply enough. Maybe due to a failed attempt at reducing costs. But something’s for certain: Poor dubbing and subtitling can turn a quality film into an incomprehensible mess. And these sorts of mistakes are never free.

In the entertainment industry, localization is the combined effort of artists, scriptwriters, translators, marketing departments, and business strategists.

In this free ebook, we will explore a few examples of localization and glocalization in the entertainment industry. We will also examine the demands of regional audiences, the failures that could leave them unsatisfied, and the various factors that need to be taken into account to engage audiences around the world.