Regarding subtitling news programs in languages other than English, there are a number of challenges that make achieving this quite difficult. The first of these is time, as it generally takes around 8 hours to subtitle one hour of programming (depending on the language). Unfortunately, a delay of that length to produce subtitles would mean the news was no longer current, so there is a very real question around committing budget to a service that would be out of date and have lost its relevance.
An alternative would be to translate live, as the program goes to air, however there are a very limited number of people who are able to live translate, and certainly too few in any given language to make this approach sustainable over the long-term.
SBS is always looking for ways to achieve great outcomes for our audience, and to this end we have now launched fast turnaround subtitling for two news services, SBS Mandarin News and SBS Arabic News. To do this, we have partnered with an external provider who is working with us to produce subtitles in a very compressed timeframe, c.2-3 hours. Given the usual time it takes to produce good quality translation, this is both experimental and cutting edge. The reason for the truncated time frame is, of course, to ensure subtitled news is as current as possible for our audiences. This initiative kicked off in early 2022 and will be monitored over time to assess the quality of translations and audience interest