Gerard van Loenhout

Founder of Subtitling.net and inVision Ondertiteling.

Gerard van Loenhout founded Subtitling.net. The professional standards behind the product come directly from his own subtitling career, which began in 1982.

That year he started translating and subtitling in Gothenburg, Sweden. Mostly for the upcoming VHS rental market, working from English, German and Swedish into Dutch. One lesson from those early years still holds: subtitle quality depends on consistent, careful work. Rushing the work, or splitting one film across several translators, produces inconsistent subtitles that are harder to read.

Back in the Netherlands he joined Subtitling International, then built the news and current-affairs translation department for the newly launched RTL Véronique from the ground up. First in Hilversum, later in Luxemburg.

In 1992 he founded inVision Ondertiteling in Amsterdam. He built it into a preferred subtitling supplier to the Dutch public broadcaster (NPO) for two decades, with subtitling work for broadcasters including SBS, RTL, Talpa and Disney, and subtitling for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers.

That experience is what shapes Subtitling.net. The reading speed limits, phrase-based line breaks and timing in the product are the professional standards Gerard developed and applied over four decades, now applied automatically.

He has also contributed to research on the subject, co-authoring "Machine Translation for Subtitling: A Large-Scale Evaluation" (LREC 2014) and teaches the professional subtitling course at ondertiteling.nl.

Connect with Gerard on LinkedIn.