Subtitle Group

Name one thing that links Prison Break, China Internet censorship and NY Times together?

For most Chinese people, especially those who are referred to as the Internet Generation, the most likely answer would be SUBTITLE GROUP!

For china, every year only about 20 Hollywood films are imported, translated and shown in theater, and a even smaller number of TV serials are imported. The reason why Government set such a limited number is that they hope this can give protection to Chinese film industry and help it develop. No one can deny that such a policy did help local film industry develop in the past decade. Yet, despite of the improvement, there is still a long long way for local films to go. People want to watch Hollywood films/ TV serials. Yet they cannot have legal access to them due to the protection policy. Apparently, there is one thing everyone can count on --- internet. People can always find resources from some foreign websites and saves money and enjoy themselves at the same time.

Surely, download is a way to solve such a problem, or, to be more specific, it solves half of the problem, which means you can have access to those films now. Yet the other half of the problem is the language. Even for students who have learnt English for years, understanding an American film is difficult, since there are a lot of slangs and the plot may have much to do with American cultures.

This is exactly the reason why subtitle groups come into people’s sight. They are not professional translators, yet most of them have a good knowledge of English, or even have stayed abroad for a few years. They volunteered to do the translation job--- no pay at all, they do this completely out of their interest in English language and western culture.

What first drew people’s attention to them was the TV serials Prison Break. At that time, some local TV channel did import the first season and it won a lot of fans. Yet they just stop introducing the following seasons. Fans of PB turned to internet for help, and there they found their savers--- subtitle groups. It were not for Prison break, subtitle groups would not be so famous. They were even regarded as the Marco Pole by those who are super fans of western cultures.

What is more, in 2006, New York Times did a special interview to one of those groups, which made them even more famous as well as brought them trouble. Since so far there has not been law on such kind of downloading and translating stuffs, they can still continue with it. Yet it is likely that such download links will be censored someday and this is surely a disaster for all the movie fans in China.