The present article explores one of the most unexpected and unpredictable changes of taboo language by language users and its translation into English as can be illustrated in the analysis of a ...Lebanese movie entitled West Beirut. The article first argues that taboo language is surely far more difficult than any other types of language to deal with in subtitling. Such a language is inelegant, but so confusing insofar as subtitlers are concerned, apparently due to the degree of social acceptability of the profanities by various cultures on the one hand, and to the technical restrictions related to the subtitling process on the other. The article shows that in an attempt to ensure mastery of the intricacies resulted from the use of obscene-loaded language and technical constraints associated to them, subtitlers use a considerable number of translation strategies. The article adopts a two-integrated approach: Toury's (1995) product-oriented Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) and ‘coupled pairsʼ to analyze the original dialogue and its English equivalent. The findings reveal that the subtitlers have resorted to six translation strategies while dealing with excessive taboo language density, namely cultural substitution (adaptation), literal translation, euphemism, omission, reformulation and change in the semantic field. It might then be concluded that utilizing some of these strategies have resulted in distortions of the original dialogue, while others have managed to reach its intended audience. Finally, the article highlights that cultural considerations play a major role in determining the translation strategies and their frequency in communicating taboo language into other cultures.
Audiovisual translation; Subtitling; Taboo language; Subtitling strategies; DTS.
The ability of music to induce emotions has been arousing a lot of interest in recent years, especially due to the boom in music streaming platforms and the use of automatic music recommenders. Music ...Emotion Recognition approaches are based on combining multiple audio features extracted from digital audio samples and different machine learning techniques. In these approaches, neuroscience results on musical emotion perception are not considered. The main goal of this research is to facilitate the automatic subtitling of music. The authors approached the problem of automatic musical emotion detection in movie soundtracks considering these characteristics and using scientific musical databases, which have become a reference in neuroscience research. In the experiments, the Constant-Q-Transform spectrograms, the ones that best represent the relationships between musical tones from the point of view of human perception, are combined with Convolutional Neural Networks. Results show an efficient emotion classification model for 2-second musical audio fragments representative of intense basic feelings of happiness, sadness, and fear. Those emotions are the most interesting to be identified in the case of movie music captioning. The quality metrics have demonstrated that the results of the different models differ significantly and show no homogeneity. Finally, these results pave the way for an accessible and automatic captioning of music, which could automatically identify the emotional intent of the different segments of the movie soundtrack.
Multilingualism in audiovisual productions has substantially increased in recent years as a reflection of today’s globalised world. While the number of publications looking at the phenomenon from the ...perspective of audiovisual translation (AVT)—especially interlingual subtitling and dubbing—has grown considerably in the last decade, there seems to be relatively little research on the rendering of multilingualism from the perspective of accessibility modes, namely subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing (SDH) and audio description (AD). This article aims to investigate how multilingualism is rendered for deaf and hard-of-hearing as well as blind and partially sighted audiences, focusing on SDH and AD, as well as audio subtitling (AST). The study analyses a small corpus of TV shows available on Netflix and aims to highlight how multilingualism is made accessible both in SDH and AD. The products selected for the study had to satisfy three main criteria: they had to be a recent production, include the presence of an L1 (English) and one or more third languages and offer both intralingual SDH (closed captions) and AD. The results show that, even within the context of a single streaming platform, the strategies applied to deal with multilingualism seem to vary quite significantly both in SDH and AD/AST, ranging from neutralisation to L3 visibility.
Our introduction argues the importance of infrastructure—both the concept and the thing it denotes—to twenty-first-century critical and literary theory. Infrastructures are big, expensive ...technological undertakings that trouble the distinction between private and public ownership because they both draw on and contribute to the public good in ways that go beyond the limits of purely private enterprise. Examples include a CEO’s attempt to commodify water and a South African grassroots organization’s unconditional demand for government provision of basic services like water and electricity. The final section offers synopses of each of the essays in the volume.
How is swearing done in subtitling across languages? This study of subtitles in different languages for Lonergan's 2016 film Manchester by the sea addresses the question with a particular goal in ...mind: not so much to identify and typologise translation strategies for swearing in the dataset, or not just, but to inspect/document the range of resources involved, at the interface of linguistics and pragmatics, in generating meaning-making options for interlingual sense-making, and publics with very different linguistic and (socio-)cultural profiles.
Most frequently occurring swearwords from dialogues in US English are considered in subtitling representation across the languages in the dataset – English, French, German, Italian, Spanish. Frequency and concordance data are the platform for qualitative analyses of a subset of units from different taboo domains in full textual context (‘fuck’, ‘shit’, ‘God’ and variants), from a broadly cross-cultural pragmatics perspective.
The study is underpinned by two main lines of enquiry: how linguistic and/or pragmatic specificities of the languages considered may impact on representation; and critically, how the medium itself may shape representation above and beyond difference into a distinctive and richly expressive instantiation of cinematic discourse, as what is revealingly for translation, and pragmatics, the curious case of subtitling.
•Representation of swearwords in film subtitling across languages.•English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, in Lonergan (2016) Manchester by the Sea.•Interface of meaning-making options and interlingual sense-making.•Film subtitles as a distinctive instantiation of cinematic discourse and form of translation.
This report discusses the process of making English subtitle by using the Aegisub application for profile movie of Padang Pariaman Regency produced by local government. The aims of making the English ...Subtitle for the profile movie is to influence the foreigners to visit Padang Pariaman as the tourism destination and to make this place well known worldwide. The profile movie tells the hidden potential sectors of Padang Pariaman, including tourism spots, farm, plantations, marine resources, hospitality, culture and customs. There are three stages conducted in the process of making the English subtitle. The stages are transcription, translation, and subtitling. The transcript of the profile movie consist of 1200 words with 14 minutes, 36 seconds in duration. The translation process, methods, and procedures are applied. There are several procedures used in the translation stage such as transference, descriptive equivalent, modulation, transposition, and recognized translation Then, the English subtitle is created by using Aegisub application. So the result of this project is a new profile of Padang Pariaman Regency with the English subtitle. Hopefully, this profile movie can be understood by foreigners who have great interest to become potential visitors in the future.
Subtitling is the most common way of translating audiovisual material interlingually or intralingually. This study examines the use of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) as a means of euphemism in the ...intralingual subtitles of Netflix's Arabic series, Jinn which sparked uproar due to the immoral scenes and inappropriate language. Subsequent to watching the series and examining the source script in the Jordanian vernacular along with the MSA subtitles, the researchers categorized them into five categories based on the themes they cover. The findings showed that the MSA intralingual subtitles contributed to toning down the inappropriate language and rendered the show more acceptable to the audience. The study recommends other researchers to conduct more studies on the use of MSA versus colloquial Arabic as a translation strategy.
During the Portuguese Estado Novo (1933-1974), many films were banned and others mutilated by the cutting of scenes and suppression and manipulation of subtitles. What reached the audience, in many ...cases, was a cleansed version of the original. A quick look into censorship documents shows how many cuts a film might have suffered. Suppressed subtitles are also relatively easy to detect. Yet, to get a complete picture, one has to take a deeper look at the subtitles, comparing them with the original spoken dialogues to detect ideological manipulations on the linguistic level. But how can one tell if a film was heavily or slightly censored? Is “censoredness” comparable? This article sets out to find an answer to the question of whether these measures are objectively describable and structurable, and if so, how the level of “censoredness” of subtitled films can be determined, with a view to allowing a larger-scale comparison of films.
Audiovisual translation and accessibility research have huge potential to transform and improve the work of practitioners in these areas. However, research publications are not necessarily designed ...to address the practical implications of research, or to be accessible to practitioners outside academia. This special issue is for practitioners, and it aims to demonstrate how research can be useful to them. The research projects presented in the articles serve practical purposes in a variety of ways, from proposing analytical models to aid in selecting translation strategies, to exploring developments in working practices. Vibrant collaboration between all stakeholders in AVT and accessibility could bring benefits to both research and practice. This introduction discusses some of the challenges involved in making such exchanges happen and examines how those challenges could be overcome.
Quality is a rather slippery concept, and its assessment in subtitling can be a challenging task, as its appreciation can easily vary depending on the different stakeholders involved in the ...production and reception of subtitles. In this paper, we evaluate quality indicators in subtitling as perceived by professional subtitlers and viewers. After exploring the various subtitle parameters that can have an impact on the quality of the end product (such as line breaks, synchronisation, display rates), we present the results of two qualitative studies conducted with professional subtitlers and subtitle viewers with different audiovisual backgrounds. The results yield some similarities and discrepancies, particularly in the way in which the strategy of condensation is perceived by the two groups, and they also help delineate the subtitle parameters that should be taken into consideration in order to improve the creative process as well as the reception of subtitles.
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