Subtitles

The bourgeoning and rapid evolution of cloud-based applications has triggered profound transformations in the audiovisual translation (AVT) mediascape. By drawing  attention  to  the  major  changes  that  web-based  ecosystems  have  introduced  in  localisation workflows, we set out to outline ways in which these new technological advances can be embedded in the AVT classroom. Along these lines, the present study sets out to explore the potential benefits of cloud platforms in AVT training curricula by exploring ways in which this technology can be exploited in subtitling training.  An  analysis  of  current  subtitling  practices and  tools,  localisation  workflows,  and  in-demand skills  in  the  AVT  industry  will  be  followed  by  an experience-based account on the use of cloud-based platforms  in  subtitler  training  environments  to simulate and carry out a wide range of tasks. Our study  pivots  around  the  idea  that  cloud  subtitling might prove useful to bridge the technological gap between academic institutions and the profession as well as to enhance the distance-learning provision of practice-oriented training in subtitling.

Seeing into Screens: Eye Tracking and the Moving Image is the first dedicated anthology that explores vision and perception as it materializes as viewers watch screen content. While nearly all moving image research either 'imagines' how its audience responds to the screen, or focuses upon external responses, this collection utilizes the data produced from eye tracking technology to assess seeing and knowing, gazing and perceiving.

The editors divide their collection into the following four sections: eye tracking performance, which addresses the ways viewers respond to screen genre, actor and star, auteur, and cinematography; eye tracking aesthetics which explores the way viewers gaze upon colour, light, movement, and space; eye tracking inscription, which examines the way the viewer responds to subtitles, translation, and written information found in the screen world; and eye tracking augmentation which examines the role of simulation, mediation, and technological intervention in the way viewers engage with screen content. At a time when the nature of viewing the screen is extending and diversifying across different platforms and exhibitions, Seeing into Screens is a timely exploration of how viewers watch the screen.

From fansubbing, fan-generated translation, to user-generated translation, from amateur translation to social translation, non-professional subtitling has come a long way since its humble beginning in the 1980s. The prevailing technological affordance enables and mobilises the digital generation to turn subtitling into a method of self-expression and mediation, and their activities have made translation a more social and visible activity than ever before.
This volume provides a comprehensive review of the current state of play of this user-generated subtitling phenomenon. It includes projects and research focusing on various aspects of non-professional subtitling, including the communities at work, the agents at play, the production conditions and the products. The perspectives in the book explore the role played by the agents involved in the emerging subtitling networks worldwide, and their impact on the communities is also discussed, based on empirical data generated from observations on active fansubbing communities. The collection demonstrates, from various viewpoints, the ways in which non-professional subtitling connects languages, cultures and communities in a global setting.

This study investigated the effect of different types of subtitles on incidental vocabulary learning among Iranian EFL learners. To this end, 60 high school students in Behbahan were selected after taking a proficiency test. The test was administered to ensure participants' homogeneity. Participants were randomly assigned to three experimental groups, namely, Bimodal group (A), Standard group (B) and Reversed group (C). They watched ten video clips selected from three animated movies with different types of subtitles: A) Bimodal subtitles (both English audio and subtitle), B) Standard subtitles (English audio and Persian subtitle) and C)Reversed subtitles (Persian audio and English subtitle). Research instrumentation included a pretest and posttest. Participants took a pretest containing new words selected from the clips. After ten treatment sessions, the posttest was administered. Data were analyzed descriptively and inferentially. To arrive at any difference between the three different types of subtitles, the researchers conducted one-way ANOVA. The results obtained from the test showed that participants in reversed subtitling group performed significantly different and learned more new vocabulary items. Standard subtitling was the second type of subtitling which was shown to be more effective than bimodal subtitling. Also, the effect of different types of subtitles on incidental English vocabulary learning between male and female was investigated in this study. To arrive at any difference between male and female in incidental English vocabulary learning an independent samples test was performed. The results obtained from the test showed that there was no significant difference between males and females in incidental English vocabulary learning.

Friday nights in Romania under the communist regime (which came to an end in December 1989), friends and family would gather in front of their television sets trying to guess what they were actually watching. Telephone calls would be made, fijilm reference and theory books consulted. Such detective skills were required due to the government's censorship tactics which included screening foreign fijilms (both on television and in cinemas) with their titles altered beyond recognition, credit sequences removed, entire scenes eliminated and dialogue ideologically "cleansed" through the subtitling process. Coauthor and Romanian national Ioana Uricaru recalls that "God" was invariably translated as Cel-de-Sus or "the one above" and "church" as edifijiciu or "edifijice." Sometimes films playing in cinemas would differ dramatically at the beginning and end of their run, as elements requiring excision came to the attention of offficials. Subtitling was the translation method associated with government media channels. As such, it was considered offficial, professional, and proper-both "ideologically correct" and the industry standard. With subtitles, interference of the "original" is kept at a minimum. As lines of text superimposed onto the film image, subtitles neither erase nor noisily intrude upon the foreign soundtrack. Consequently, they are often viewed as a clean technique that respects the source material by enabling it to remain intact. However, in Romania, the identifijication of subtitling with "quality" translation was compromised by its close link to adjacent practices of content deletion and paraphrasing for the sake of ideological alteration. The role that subtitling played in making meaning palatable for the "party line" meant that this technique was, concurrently, subject to suspicion and distrust, especially by those (extremely numerous) audience members who understood foreign languages and were able to fact-check offfijcial versions. In the following discussion, we note how translation can function both in the service and subversion of censorship, and how both roles are complicated by contradictory notions of quality and authenticity. We begin by pitting Romania's official, government-sanctioned translation methods against the unofficial, amateur, and alternative practices that typify piracy operations. We then proceed to unpack and expand notions of media piracy.

This study tests two different existing approaches to Subtitling for the Deaf and the Hard-of-Hearing (SDHH) on deaf, hard-of-hearing and hearing primary-school children in Italy: verbatim subtitles aimed at accuracy (SKY style); and adapted subtitles aimed at usability (RAI style). To this aim, three short, self-contained cartoons were intralingually subtitled (Italian into Italian). The videos were then shown to 35 hearing children and five DHH children. The subjects were administered three questionnaires: one collected background data, one measured perception and one measured reception. The data showed that verbatim subtitles not only were the preferred approach by each group of children, but they also facilitated understanding more than adapted subtitles. We also found that SDHH for children did not interfere with comprehension of images in the video, and that adapted subtitles seemed to favour understanding of images more than verbatim ones. Furthermore, analysis of the data collected provided food for thought regarding speaker identification, legibility, readability, text comprehension, and ways to express diegetic sounds, along with a new theoretical framework for the production of SDHH.

Across lingua-cultures: Introductions and wishes in subtitled TV series

Veronica Bonsignori, Silvia Bruti


In previous studies (Bonsignori, Bruti, Masi 2011, 2012), we have focused on greetings, leave-takings and good wishes as ‘complex’ expressions that convey a vast array of socio-pragmatic meanings. The importance of such expressions and the consequences of their complexities in translation in general and in dubbing in particular have also emerged, especially as they correspond to cultural practices and habits.
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of two rather negletcted English conversational routines (Coulmas 1981), namely introductions and good wishes, in Italian subtitling by establishing how much narrative space they are granted, which specific linguistic features they have, how frequent conventional expressions are used in both original dialogues and translation, and, finally, the emerging patterns of translation in subtitling, with special attention to cross-cultural habits that are necessarily reflected in the linguistic texture of an exchange. The translation of socio-pragmatic aspects has not received the lion’s share in the domain of audiovisual translation studies, although much more sensitivity towards the area has been observed in the last decade. Although it has since long been recognised that the transformation from oral to written language implicated in subtitling makes wording more formal and neat, almost devoid of the many sociolinguistic and pragmatic markers that give spoken language its natural flavour (Kovačič 1996, Hatim, Mason 2000, Greenall 2011), studies on the translation of socio-pragmatic meanings in interlingual subtitles are not particularly numerous. Blini and Matte Bon (1996), for example, pointed to the necessity of reaching a compromise in which “the illocutionary aspect of the text should […] be privileged by trying to reproduce the same speech acts in the target language on the basis of a careful analysis of the […] pragmalinguistic elements” (1996: 328, our translation). In recent years some pragmatic and cross-cultural issues have been investigated: the speech act of advice in translation from Spanish to English (Pinto 2010), vocatives in Italian subtitles (Bruti, Perego 2005, 2008), the Gricean cooperation principle in Polish subtitles (Bączkowska 2012), the translation of the nuances of meaning contained in the T/V person pronouns into English (Guillot 2010), direct, indirect and implicit compliments in (Italian) subtitles (Bruti 2006, 2009a, 2009b). Many more topics are yet still to be thoroughly explored.
The data are retrieved from a small self-compiled corpus which comprises the transcription of the original dialogues of two seasons (one for each series) of Brothers & Sisters and Gilmore Girls and the Italian subtitles for the routines that are analysed. Both series are mostly ‘conversational’, as they are centred on the conversational exchanges between characters in their everyday life, a fact that potentially grants more space to the use of the two types of conversational routines under investigation.
In this work we adopt a multidisciplinary approach, one that integrates an analysis of original audiovisual dialogues with the aim of identifying general trends in terms of language use and then investigates the translational practices in subtitling, by making reference to cultural scenarios in the target lingua-culture.