The rapidly growing demand for subtitling on the global translation market has resulted in a new development which has revolutionised the way subtitles are created and distributed: the template. A ...template is a subtitle file containing a time-coded transcription of the dialogue to be later translated into multiple target languages. Loved by global subtitling companies and frowned upon by subtitlers, templates have become an inseparable part of modern subtitling workflows. The goal of our study is to examine this new development in terms of quality, its impact on the profession and the resulting changes in subtitler competences. With this goal in mind, we conducted an online survey which was completed by 344 professionals from 47 countries involved in the subtitling process with templates. We gathered data on the content of the templates, subtitling workflows, types of software, pivot translation, annotations, and language combinations. We found important differences in spotting skills between subtitlers depending on their experience and type of company they work for. Our results also show that the quality of templates currently available on the market is rather inadequate. We present suggestions for improvement based on the subtitlers' views. The results may be used to inform current market practices.
Video description is the automatic generation of natural language sentences that describe the contents of a given video. It has applications in human-robot interaction, helping the visually impaired ...and video subtitling. The past few years have seen a surge of research in this area due to the unprecedented success of deep learning in computer vision and natural language processing. Numerous methods, datasets, and evaluation metrics have been proposed in the literature, calling the need for a comprehensive survey to focus research efforts in this flourishing new direction. This article fills the gap by surveying the state-of-the-art approaches with a focus on deep learning models; comparing benchmark datasets in terms of their domains, number of classes, and repository size; and identifying the pros and cons of various evaluation metrics, such as SPICE, CIDEr, ROUGE, BLEU, METEOR, and WMD. Classical video description approaches combined subject, object, and verb detection with template-based language models to generate sentences. However, the release of large datasets revealed that these methods cannot cope with the diversity in unconstrained open domain videos. Classical approaches were followed by a very short era of statistical methods that were soon replaced with deep learning, the current state-of-the-art in video description. Our survey shows that despite the fast-paced developments, video description research is still in its infancy due to the following reasons: Analysis of video description models is challenging, because it is difficult to ascertain the contributions towards accuracy or errors of the visual features and the adopted language model in the final description. Existing datasets neither contain adequate visual diversity nor complexity of linguistic structures. Finally, current evaluation metrics fall short of measuring the agreement between machine-generated descriptions with that of humans. We conclude our survey by listing promising future research directions.
The issue of multilingualism often arises in the context of audiovisual translation, when dubbing, subtitling or voice-over is under discussion. This aspect also does not lose its significance in ...subtitling multilingual films for the deaf and hard of hearing. By applying this mode, the content of audiovisual product is conveyed to the deaf by employing a special instrument of audiovisual translation, namely, specialized subtitles (SDH). In this case, subtitles must include not only a translated dialogue text; the additional information that helps the deaf perceive the off screen non-verbal and verbal cues, understand the narrative and mood of the film and estimate roles of foreign languages must be added as well. The paper aims at exploring strategies for conveying multilingualism to the deaf in the films created by Lithuanian filmmakers. Three Lithuanian multilingual films “Back to Your Arms“ (2010, directed by K. Vildžiūnas), „How We Played the Revolution“ (2011, directed by G. Žickytė) and „Miracle“ (2017, directed by E. Vertelytė) as the research material were selected for the analysis. In the theoretical part, strategies of application of multilingual films suggested by foreign scholars (De Higes-Andino et al., 2013, 2014, Szarkowska & Żbikowska & Krejtz, 2013, 2014) are outlined; insights into multilingualism presented by Lithuanian researchers are reviewed and practical principles that help reveal multilingualism for the deaf audience in Lithuanian films are examined. A descriptive-analytical approach is employed to analyze the rendition of multilingualism to the target audience; whereas, to reveal needs of the Lithuanian deaf the analysis of achieved quantitative data is made. The study has revealed that the process of conveying multilingualism to the deaf viewers in Lithuanian films is a process that requires creativity. Moreover, the results of the analysis suggested that in the analyzed Lithuanian films a multilingual source text was only translated and subtitled by applying a standard subtitling format. With regard to the multilingualism rendering for the deaf, it can been noted that standard subtitles only partially revealed the content of the film; though, the information and aspects about multilingualism as such still remained inaccessible. For this reason, special subtitles (SDH) for the hearing impaired viewers should be prepared; however, this type of subtitles has stayed uncommon for the Lithuanian filmmakers.
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.
The present article offers an introduction to the relationship between the entertainment and translation industry, arguing that dubbings and subtitles are by-products of the entertainment industry, ...directly contributing to the success of the show. It also deals with the translator’s competence, offering examples of translation challenges from the (in)famous American TV show, House of Cards, connected to terms and expressions pertaining to general knowledge of the world and of the United States. The Introduction offers an insight into audiovisual translation and its successful branches and explains binge-watching and binge-translation as well, also including several scholars’ analyses of the TV show. The Methodological Background describes how a collection of term bases came into being starting from the original English script and several Romanian subtitles of the episodes of official (DVD-release and Netflix) and amateur (freely available online) versions. This is followed by thirty examples in two sets, discussing the translation of terms belonging to general knowledge and US geopolitics in particular. The Conclusions section discusses the terms of ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ translator irrespective of their qualifications, focusing instead on ‘quality assurance’, a rather subjective term. Certain corpus-based findings are also highlighted connected to the possibilities of relying on generalization, explicitation or calque referring to general culture and US politics focusing on the intelligibility of politicotainment, a term recently coined by Riegert.
This article presents an analysis of the translation strategies used for culture-specific items related to gastronomy in the Lithuanian subtitles of the American comedy-drama film “The Hundred-Foot ...Journey” (2014), directed by Lasse Hallström. The film explores the convergence of diverse cultural perspectives through its culinary practices. Drawing on a theoretical framework that includes translation strategies by Jorge Díaz Cintas and Aline Remael (2021), this study identifies seven distinct translation strategies employed by the Lithuanian translator, including loan translation, literal translation, explication, substitution, calque, transposition, and omission, to render the distinguished 56 culture-specific items from the source language into the target language. The study offers a systematic approach to the analysis of how translators handle culture-specific items within audiovisual media, accounting for spatio-temporal subtitling limitations and parameters that may impact the decision-making process of the translator.
: This article carries out a comparative study of the commercial and fan subtitling of the same source text, namely “The Crocodile’s Dilemma”,the pilot episode of the TV series Fargo (2014). The aim ...is to ascertain the commonalities and divergences between these two different types of translation with regard to European Portuguese. It seeks to verify if the usual tendency of commercial subtitling being domesticating and fan subtitling foreignizing applies in Portugal or if Portugal deviates from this pattern. Furthermore, the herein article shall also focus on other translational matters outside the domestication and foreignization aspects, although with a bit less coverage. The attention will also shift toward the tackling of taboo language and omission of verbal information between commercial and fan subtitling, with commercial subtitling being typically associated with censorship and omissions, whilst fan subtitling is usually known for its uncensored all-inclusive version. Naturally, the case study of a single pilot episode cannot permit encompassing conclusionsto be drawn, but it can provide a peek into the commercial and fan subtitling phenomena in Portugal in order to get a preliminary idea of how it compares to the rest of the world.
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