Multimedia translator Meredith Cannella ’09 helps make movies and TV shows accessible to audiences worldwide.
By Robyn Rime
Watching movies or TV shows with the captions turned on has become a trend among viewers, especially younger audiences.
“It’s called the Christopher Nolan effect,” says Meredith Cannella ’09, a multimedia translator currently based in Spain and working primarily in Spanish and English. Dialogue in that director’s films is often incomprehensible, and the problem isn’t limited to Nolan. “A lot of audio nowadays isn’t clear. Having the captions on helps viewers make sure they know what’s happening.”
Depending on the show, viewers may be seeing Cannella’s work.
“If you’re watching a series and put on the closed captions, you’ll see the kind of work I do,” says Cannella. “Or when you’re watching a foreign series and need subtitles to understand what’s going on, that’s my kind of translation. If you watch a dubbed show, I would be the person working on that initial script.” Her job is “to translate film or series dialogue into fluid, American English, so viewers around the world can enjoy it.”
Cannella’s clients include everyone from major streaming platforms to independent filmmakers. Her recent résumé features popular and long-running streaming series, such as Grace and Frankie (2015–2022) and Elite (2018–2024), as well as two Academy Award-nominated films: the Chilean release El Conde (Pablo Larraín, 2023) and the Spanish film Society of the Snow (J.A. Bayona, 2023), tapped for Best International Feature.
How do you go from audio in Spanish to English words on the screen? A complete transcript of the audio is used for translation and dubbing (where the audio is replaced by dialogue recorded in a different language), subtitles (for hearing audiences who don’t know the language), or closed captions (subtitles that contain extra information for the hard of hearing, such as ambient sounds or tone of speaking).
“Our closed captions have to be creative,” says Cannella. “You think, how do I describe this background music? What kind of feeling does it convey? How does the sound of that play into the bigger movie?”
The whole process rewards careful attention, but detailed work like this also presents challenges. Meticulous directors can become deeply involved in the captioning process, says Cannella. Their suggestions can range from verb tense and word choice to descriptions of sound effects to the position of captions and how long they should remain on the screen.
“Occasionally, the final captions are more the director’s than mine,” she says.
Other “cool but stressful” projects include series with rapid-fire dialogue, such as the notoriously wordy Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, a streaming series Cannella worked on in 2016. And reality shows are the worst, she says. “Love Is Blind, for example, is one that I don’t even touch anymore because everyone speaks at the same time, and everyone speaks a mile a minute. You can’t capture everything that they say.”
Like many fields, translation and captioning have recently been impacted by the use of AI to automate tasks. Having worked with AI suggestions, however, Cannella knows that computer-generated products are inferior to creative, human translations.
“What I do is also something quite like art,” she says. “It’s a very specialized kind of writing. It feels like I’m doing something creative on a daily basis. For that, I’m really grateful.”
Cannella is also thankful for her Geneseo experience, where she earned a double major in Spanish and psychology and a minor in Latin American studies. She studied abroad in Nicaragua and Spain, then received a master’s in translation studies from Kent State University and a master’s in secondary education from the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha in Spain. She earned a Fulbright US Student Award for study abroad in Portugal in 2015–16.
“If I hadn’t studied abroad as an undergraduate, I never would have considered moving to Europe for work options after graduation,” Cannella says. “I wouldn’t have felt confident in my ability to communicate in a workplace setting. If I hadn’t made that initial choice to take Spanish classes at Geneseo, I know my life would be so different.”
