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Client: Disney content, via a global media localization partner

 
The Walt Disney Company owns the Disney+ streaming service and the Disney, Disney Junior, Disney Channel, Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, 20th Century and FX content brands. Disney+ launched in Türkiye in June 2022. We worked on Disney content through a global media localization partner; Disney was the content owner, not our direct client.
 
▮The Brief
 
Our work on Disney content ran across 2021 and 2022 in four streams. It began in 2021 with Turkish subtitles for children's and family content. In 2022 it grew into an eight-month programme around the Disney+ launch in Türkiye: a large subtitle package on a fixed deadline, Turkish metadata for the launch catalogue, and English metadata for Turkish productions entering Disney's catalogue for Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.

The streams ran in both language directions and fed the same catalogue, so they had to stay consistent with each other.
 
▮Content Scope
2021, children's and family subtitling (EN>TR):
  • 59 titles. Disney Junior preschool series, Disney Channel animation, Marvel and Star Wars animated series, and Pixar-related series for Disney+.
2022, Disney+ Türkiye launch subtitling (EN>TR):
  • 647 episodes and films across 68 titles. 19,981 minutes, approximately 333 hours, delivered between early March and mid April 2022, then at lower volume through summer 2022.
  • Full catalogue range. Disney film classics, Disney Channel originals, Marvel and Star Wars titles, and FX and Fox comedy series, including one series of 140 episodes.
2022, Disney+ Türkiye catalogue metadata (EN>TR):
  • Titles, synopses and credits. At least four batches from February 2022, totalling hundreds of thousands of words. Two batches alone covered 142 titles, 1,412 rows and about 158,000 words.
  • Content. Marvel Studios and Lucasfilm series, Pixar shorts, Disney+ originals, Disney Channel series, the 20th Century film archive, and bonus material.
2022, Turkish productions for Disney's CEE-MENA catalogue (TR>EN):
  • More than 30 Turkish productions. Primetime drama, comedy, and food and lifestyle programmes.
  • English metadata under Disney's Schedule E format. Titles, synopses, and cast and crew credits.
 
▮What the Work Required
Volume against a fixed date. 19,981 minutes in five weeks is far beyond what one subtitler or a small team can deliver. At peak, more than two dozen subtitle translators worked in parallel. Every file passed through translation, quality check and proofing, each handled by a different person. Finding Turkish subtitlers was not the hard part; keeping them consistent was.

A wide register range. Over two years, the work moved from preschool animation to adult primetime comedy. Children's subtitles needed shorter lines for slower readers, age-appropriate vocabulary, and creative rewriting of songs and rhymes. Comedy needed humour that works in Turkish, not a literal rendering of English jokes.

Writing to a character count. Each catalogue title needed short, medium and full Turkish synopses, each with a hard character limit set by the Disney+ interface. Turkish usually runs longer than English, so synopses often had to be rewritten, not just shortened. Cast billing order and name romanization followed Disney's formatting rules.

Consistency across streams. Subtitles and metadata for the same catalogue were produced at the same time. A character name spelled one way in a synopsis and another way in the subtitles confuses viewers, so both had to use the same terminology. Long series split between several translators had to read the same in episode 3 and episode 103.

The less common direction. Most Turkish agencies translate into Turkish. The CEE-MENA stream ran the other way. Each Turkish title had to be kept, translated or romanized for international discoverability; names with ç, ğ, ı, ö, ş and ü had to work in international content systems; and synopses built on Turkish family and social codes had to make sense to viewers who do not share them.