She often took the work home, receiving about US$12 for a film, though more experienced translators received up to US$30. Films can earn student translators a few dozen to a couple of hundred dollars, depending on the subject matter and on whether they have a script to work from or must work solely from a video copy.
Once the subtitles are complete, the discs are then churned out in the millions in plants hidden in manufacturing cities in southern China, like Dongguan and Shantou. And then a vast web of street hawkers and small shops sells them in virtually every corner of China.
The quality of pirated copies can vary enormously from the shaky, muffled "grab versions" shot with camcorders sneaked into cinemas to crystal clear digital copies made from legitimate DVDs.
Grutka of the Motion Picture Association estimated that last year film piracy in the Asia-Pacific region cost filmmakers US$640 million in sales, with those in China the most frequent violators, accounting for US$168 million. (The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry recently estimated that more than 90 percent of all music CDs sold in China last year were pirated, costing the industry US$530 million in sales.)
Officials for the Guangzhou city and Guangdong province cultural bureaus, which are in charge of preventing piracy, declined to comment on the issue. But in recent years, China has sought to rein in piracy. Shanwei in Guangdong province -- a center of pirate production -- recently was the scene of a ceremonial destruction of 26 million film and music discs. Last year, Chinese authorities say, they seized 14 million pirate VCDs and 6.1 million illegal DVD discs.
But the momentum still seems strongly in favor of China's pirates. Days after the premier of the latest Terminator film in the US, for example, pirate copies were on sale throughout the country.
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