3 Screen Translation
In order to show how Scandinavia fits into the European media translation
scene, and to place the texts under investigation in a wider context, , this
chapter is dedicated to a short survey of audiovisual translation and related
subjects. As Scandinavia has been called “a bastion of subtitling” (Ivarsson
and Carroll 1998: 5), the focus is on interlingual subtitling and related topics.
Most of this chapter is based on the research of others, notably Gottlieb
(chiefly 1994, 1997, and 2001) and Ivarsson and Carroll (1998), but the efforts of many other researchers and practitioners are also included. Many of
the terms used in the present study are introduced and explained here, and
most of these are commonplace in the discipline and the profession of subtitling. There are a few new angles on some aspects, however, notably ‘central
cueing’ (3.3.2.1) and the ‘contract of illusion’ (3.3.4). The chapter contains a
short synchronic survey of language transfer methods, but I have refrained
from doing any historical review, as the focus of this study is not really diachronic. This survey culminates in a more detailed description of subtitling
as a phenomenon and as a process, and of various other phenomena pertinent
to subtitling, such as condensation and exposure times.
3.1 Language transfer on screen
The issue of what constitutes translation is a sticky one, and there is disagreement between scholars and practitioners in the discipline as to what
should be included in the term. Some, like Cattrysse (2002), take a broad
view and include the adaptation of books and plays for the cinema, whereas
others (e.g. Wildblood 2002) take the more purist view and do not even include interlingual subtitling. In the present study, a middle road is taken, the
core idea of which is that whenever a message is transferred from one language to another, translation takes place. However, there are many forms of
language transfer that share common traits with translation, and these are
dealt with in this section. Screen translation, which itself is a form of language transfer on screen, will nevertheless be discussed in the next section of
this chapter.
The scope of this survey is further limited by the audiovisual focus of the
present study; forms of language transfer that do not include a screen, such
as literary translation and most forms of interpreting are not included in the
1
survey. There are many excellent other sources for these subjects, such as
Nida 1964, Toury 1995, Venuti 1995 or Landers 2001 for literary translation
and the works of Wadensjö 1998, Gile 1998, 1999 or Pöchhacker 2004 for
interpreting.
3.1.1 Intralingual subtitling
Intralingual subtitling, or Same Language Subtitling (SLS) as it is sometimes
called (e.g. by Kothari et al. 2002), is a form of language transfer on screen
that does not involve translation. Instead, there is only a shift from the spoken mode of the dialogue in a film or TV programme to the written mode of
the subtitles. This is sometimes done for pedagogical reasons, e.g. for the
benefit of language learners, but its main raison d’être is to be an accessibility tool for the deaf and hard of hearing. As such, it exists mainly as a
teletext option on television, which can be turned on or off at the viewer’s
discretion (and also as an optional feature on DVDs). In this form, intralingual subtitling is often better known as ‘closed captions’, as opposed to
‘open captions’, which are subtitles for television that the viewers cannot
turn off. It should be mentioned, however, that intralingual subtitles are not
synonymous with closed captions. In Scandinavia, some programmes are
subtitled intralingually using open captions, which are often removed for
reruns of the programme.
In the last few years there has been an increase in both the production of
and the academic interest in intralingual subtitles. In the United Kingdom,
for instance, the Communications Act of 2003 requires that 60% of all programming in that country be subtitled for the deaf and hard of hearing, and
the BBC has announced a goal of 80% by 2008 (Hearing Concern) and ultimately 100% soon after that. As a good example of the recent academic interest in intralingual subtitles, Sahlin (2001) deserves to be mentioned for
her thorough methodology and substantial corpus.
In Scandinavia, the situation for the deaf and hard of hearing is approaching that of the U.K. In both Denmark and Sweden, the public service companies are aiming for 100% subtitling for all pre-recorded domestic programming in the near future, according to Gitte Heide Olsen of DR (personal
communication (henceforth p.c.), October 2006) and Magnus Rönnlid of
SVT (p.c., October 2006). Certain genres are excluded from this goal, however, such as young children’s programming, which tends to be dubbed or
voiced-over because of its being aimed at a pre-literate audience, and music
programmes. To this should be added that all foreign-language programming
is subtitled, so all in all, most of what is aired on Scandinavian television is
subtitled, either intra- or interlingually. Comparatively little intralingual subtitling in Scandinavia contains renderings of non-verbal audio material (e.g.
a caption saying: “the phone rings”), however. Instead, most of what is produced focuses on the verbal audio channel, rendering dialogue only.
2
Many of the concerns and media-specific constraints (cf. 3.3.3) of intralingual subtitling are shared by its translational counterpart. Both are subject
to norms of exposure times, reading speed constraints, subtitle density and
condensation issues. Pioneering efforts have also been made by Neves
(2005) to bridge the gap between the two categories of subtitling, by producing interlingual subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing. These are interlingual subtitles (i.e. translations from other languages) that use all the extra
annotation common to intralingual subtitles that give the deaf and hard of
hearing access to the non-verbal audio features of a film or TV programme.
In fact, this has been even further developed by Neves by experimental inclusion of special symbols, such as emoticons (2005: 226ff.).
Even though intralingual subtitling shares many of the media-specific
constraints of interlingual subtitling, it also shares a media-specific constraint with dubbing (cf. section 3.2.2, below). As many people with hearing
impairments use lip-reading as an additional source of information, the message in the subtitles should not be too far removed in lexis or syntax from the
original, which means that a certain degree of synchronization is called for.
There is thus a limit to how much paraphrasing is used in intralingual subtitling. This in turn calls for fairly verbatim subtitles, which might cause problems of a different kind. The hearing-impaired are in no way a homogeneous
group, as the degree of loss of hearing varies, and equally importantly the
time when the hearing was lost. The congenitally deaf are known to be slow
readers (cf. e.g. Sahlin 2001: 99 ff. or de Linde and Kay 1999: 11f) and
would not be helped by verbatim subtitles, since these would require a very
high reading speed.
3.1.1.1 Live subtitling
One form of subtitling that appears in both inter- and intralingual form is live
subtitling. It is most commonly used for intralingual subtitling, so it will be
discussed here.1 Not much research has been carried out on the topic of live
subtitling so far, probably because it is a fairly rare phenomenon, but that is
changing. For instance, a seminar was held by the University of Bologna’s
department of translation, language and culture at Forlì about the topic in
November 2006 (www.respeaking.net). Also, live subtitling is often brought
up at conferences on multidimensional translation. The information in this
section stems from such conference presentations, notably Müller (2005) and
Carroll et al (2006).
Live subtitling, as the name suggests, is done in real-time when a programme is aired. It is used exclusively for live broadcasts (e.g. of sporting
events) and television news. To aid the subtitlers, stenography or special
‘Velotype’ keyboards with short commands have been developed to increase
1
For a more detailed classification of the different kinds of subtitling that exist today, the
reader is referred to Bartoll 2004.
3
their typing speed. However, it is nowadays common for live subtitlers to
use respeaking. This is done with the aid of voice recognition software. The
subtitler repeats an edited version of what is said on-screen and may also
proofread and edit the subtitle in real-time. It is of course impossible to
achieve the same synchrony in live subtitling as in pre-produced subtitling,
but the lag is no more than a few seconds. This form of language transfer
puts enormous stress on the subtitler and for this reason, it is common for
more than one subtitler to be involved. Typically, two subtitlers take short
turns to subtitle a TV programme when typing is the mode of production,
and a great deal of preparation goes into the process, in the form of researching background data and issues that might come up during a broadcast. Often, a simultaneous interpreter is also included in the team, as the skills of
simultaneous interpreting (such as split-second decision making, and stress
tolerance) are as important as those of subtitling, when it comes to live subtitling (Carroll, p.c., May 2007).
In Denmark, DR started up a service of subtitling of live interviews and
the like based on respeaking on October 1, 2006. This was done with the aid
of two government ministries and a Danish software company, and initially
in corporation with TV2, according to the head of subtitling at DR, Heide
Olsen (p.c., February, 2007). Live subtitling for national news and some
other live broadcasts has been the practice on SVT in Sweden since 1988,
according to the head of subtitling at SVT, Rönnlid (p.c., October, 2006).
This has been done using typing, but SVT is now moving into respeaking as
well. On SVT, 60% of all live national programming was subtitled live or
semi-live (using pre-typed subtitles that are cued live) in 2006. This is an
impressive figure, but not as impressive as the BBC which subtitles 95% of
its live programming live, meaning 20,000 hours of live subtitling per annum, according to David Padmore of Red Bee Media (formerly BBC Broadcast, p.c., October, 2006).
3.1.2 Audio description
Just as the hearing-impaired can get increased access to audiovisual material
through intralingual subtitling, the vision-impaired can get increased access
through audio description (AD). Just as interlingual subtitling makes the
aural visible, audio description makes the visual aural. The idea is fairly
simple: a narrator describes what can be seen on-screen in as great a detail as
possible and/or necessary: “the action, body language, facial expressions,
scenery and costumes” (Benecke 2004: 78). Even though the general idea
might be simple, the execution of it is often very tricky business indeed. The
narration should not block or clash with pre-existing dialogue, sound effects
or relevant music. This makes AD very complicated in films that already
contain a great deal of aural information, e.g. rapid dialogue, and such films
are generally not audio described, according to Benecke (2004: 79).
4
Audio description is not nearly as widespread a phenomenon as intralingual subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing, but it is on the rise. According to Orero, the history of audio description in countries such as the U.K.,
the U.S., Canada and Spain shares a common development from amateur
practice to professional endeavour:
Beginning with live and open AD for special play performances, moving to
recorded AD for films to be sent internally to members of associations, to the
hopefully comprehensive standard, public and professional AD which will be
present in Digital television (DTV) and commercial DVDs (2005: 8).
According to Benecke (2004: 78), AD began in the early 1980s in the U.S.
and developed somewhat independently in the U.S. and in various major
European countries. In the U.S., the top four networks have to offer 200
hours of audio described programming each, and in the U.K. 4% of all programming has to be audio described, according to Benecke (2004: 78). In
Scandinavia, audio description is very scarce indeed, even if Clark (2001)
states that Sweden was the first country to offer audio description in a movie
theatre. At the moment, AD, or syntolkning/synstolkning (“sight interpretation”) as it is called in Sweden and Denmark is available on neither Swedish
nor Danish television (Heide Olsen and Eva Åkerberg, p.c., October 2006).
There are, however, moves towards this accessibility tool in Scandinavia. A
few DVD films have an AD option, and there is pressure from lobby groups
such as Dansk Blindesamfund ([The Danish Society for the Blind]) to introduce it on television as well (cf. Dansk Blindesamfund).
As indicated by Orero’s quote above, AD can be produced live, just like
live subtitling. This is described by Matamala (2005) and Matamala and
Orero (2007), who add that up to three different audio describers may be
involved to describe different aspects of an opera performance in the U.S.
Presumably, however, the intensity involved in live audio description may
not be as heavy as it is for live subtitling. In Sweden, the European Athletics
Championships 2006 were audio described live (Dansk Blidesamfund).
In Sweden, there is also a service called ‘talande textremsa’ (spoken subtitle), which is also known as audio subtitling (cf. Matamala and Orero
2007). This is a service for the partially sighted, and it is produced electronically, as voice synthesizing software ‘reads’ the subtitles out loud. However,
accessing this service requires additional hardware for the users. This service
does not exist in Denmark at the present time.
3.2 Audiovisual translation
‘Screen translation’ and ‘audiovisual translation’ are two nearly synonymous
terms, as indeed are ‘media translation’ and ‘multimedia translation’. The
5
last term is theoretically the broadest, but it is arguably most often used for
the translation of multimedia applications, such as computer games, web
sites and computer software (cf. e.g. Hernández Bartolomé and Mendiluce
Cabrera 2005). This in turn is closely connected with issues of localization,
which is beyond the scope of the present survey. Instead, the reader is referred to O’Hagan (1996), O’Hagan and Ashworth (2002) and Pym (2004,
2006). According to Google (www.google.com), ‘media translation’ is the
most common term, but ‘screen translation’ and ‘audiovisual translation’
(AVT) are the most common terms in academic circles, even though ‘media
translation’ is also used here2. ‘Audiovisual translation’ would include all
forms of translation that appears in an audio and/or visual context. ‘Screen
translation’, on the other hand, would include any translation that appears on
a screen, be it the silver screen, a computer screen or TV screen. This would
imply that surtitling for the opera and theatre is included in AVT, but not
necessarily in screen translation. In these contexts, AVT would thus be a
superordinate term to screen translation. On the other hand, surtitled texts are
displayed on screens, even if the source text is not, so the terms can also be
used interchangeably. In the present study, ‘Screen Translation’ and ‘AVT’
will therefore be used as synonyms.
The three main modes of AVT are subtitling, dubbing and voice-over.
The first of these is discussed at length in section 3.3, as it is the form of
AVT that the present study investigates. The first two of these will be briefly
discussed presently. First of all, however, it may be warranted to give a few
observations on a form of language transfer that is very interesting as it
could be said to be based on quasi-translation: versioning.
3.2.1 Versioning
Unlike the three prototypical forms of AVT (dubbing, subtitling and voiceover), which are forms of post-production translation, versioning could be
described as pre-production translation. Instead of producing a film or TV
programme and then translating it into various target languages, in the case
of versioning multiple-language versions of the same film or TV programme
are produced.
Versioning is one of the oldest forms of AVT. According to Gottlieb, it
began already in the first few years of sound film. In its infancy, the same
director shot the same film twice (or as many times as required) with the
actors speaking different languages (1997: 52). Chiaro (forthcoming) describes how this mode of AVT became so popular for Laurel and Hardy
films that when dubbing later was used, the Italian dubbing actors had to
mimic Laurel and Hardy’s American accents in their Italian. This mode of
2
For instance “(Multi) Media Translation” was used in the title of Gambier & Gottlieb
(2001).
6
transfer was of course very costly, and such ‘simultaneous’ versions are hard
to find today.3 Instead today, we have what Gottlieb calls “adaptations” and
“formatted versions” (1997: 53).
In adaptations4, the rights to produce a TL version of a SL programme or
film are bought by a TL producer. The TL producer would then stage the
film or TV programme again, in the TL with TL actors. The ST script is
bought along with the production rights, so it is still a case of translation
(Gottlieb 1997: 53). However, it could be described as a covert (cf. House
1997: 69) form of translation, as the fact that the viewers are watching a
translation is often toned down. More often than not, the ST is only mentioned in the end credits, and the title of the product is usually changed.
Also, a great deal of cultural adaptation and other strategies are used in the
translation, which makes the TT appear as a TL original. Adaptations are
also known for being freer than other forms of translation, so much so that
whole scenes are edited out or added. There is thus a good reason for talking
about a ‘version’ (in House’s (1997: 73f) terms) rather than a ‘translation’.
A few Swedish examples of adaptations of anglophone TV series are
Rena rama Rolf, TV4 (the Honeymooners, CBS), En fyra för tre, TV4
(Three’s Company, ABC) and Albert och Herbert, SVT (Steptoe and Son,
BBC). This final example is often seen as a typical Swedish comedy, and
people appear very incredulous when they are told that it is an adaptation.
Very successful adaptations, such as this one, may take on lives of their own,
with new episodes or whole series being written, which make use of the
original characters and setting, but which have no SL screenplay counterpart,
in which case we can no longer talk about a translation. Occasionally, an
original TV series, such as Only When I Laugh (BBC) has been shown in
Sweden, only to be adapted and rerecorded in Swedish a decade or two later,
in this case as Sjukan.
Adaptation is also used for films. In Scandinavia we have the example of
the very popular Danish Olsenbanden films (1969–1981), which were
adapted for Norway, using the same title during a longer period, 1969–1998,
and later for Sweden as Jönssonligan (1981–1995). As regards feature films,
this is a common form of AVT on the American market. The general American public is known to be reluctant towards subtitles (cf. e.g. Zoglin (1992),
The Economist (1997)), and there are many examples of how films in other
languages have been versioned in Hollywood, such as the Danish film
Nattevagten (1994), which starred Ewan McGregor in its 1997 Hollywood
version Nightwatch. In fact, there is even a further degree of cultural domestication for the American market. The British mockumentary sitcom The
3
One such example is the German version of Monty Python’s Flying Circus made by the
original cast in 1971 (www.IMDb.com “Monty Python’s fliegender Zirkus”)
4
Dries (1995: 40–41) further divides adaptations into “remakes” and “double versions”, the
main difference being the time lag between the versions. Her term for “formatted versions” is
simply “formats”.
7
Office, BBC, from 2001 was made by NBC in an American version of the
same name in 2005.
If adaptations are just borderline translations, it is even harder to find arguments for calling formatted versions translations. In the case of formatted
versions, a programme format is exported, rather than a programme script.
The TL producers buy the format of the show, often including rights to logos, a set or even a locale (e.g. in the French format Fort Boyard, France2,
which has both Swedish and Danish formatted versions) and then fill it with
TL content. Perhaps the most common genre for formatted versions is the
game show. Examples of these could be Who Wants to be a Millionaire, ITV
and Jeopardy!, NBC, both of which exist in Swedish and Danish formatted
versions produced locally.
3.2.2 Dubbing
When a film is dubbed, the original SL soundtrack is removed and replaced
by a TL soundtrack. This means that dubbing creates “in theory, the perfect
illusion” (Gottlieb 1997: 54) of not being translated at all. In actual fact,
there can be a huge credibility gap between the linguistic ‘reality’ produced
by the soundtrack, and the cultural reality of the images, and the content of
the dialogue. However, in the dubbing countries, the audience is used to that
and is not bothered by the fact that John Wayne apparently speaks German
or that six very American friends drinking coffee in Manhattan discuss an
outing to Central Park in French. For people in subtitling countries, such
anomalies are hard to come to terms with, because of their background, and
they often find it hard to “suspend their linguistic disbelief”, as Romero
Fresco (2006) puts it, the way that people in dubbing countries do. In a later
section (3.3.4), however, I will show that people in the subtitling countries
are indulging in a similar kind of suspension of disbelief.
As Chaume (2004b: 40) points out (a point also made by Gottlieb 1997:
54) dubbing can be both intra- and interlingual. Interlingual dubbing is the
most obvious form, as the replacing soundtrack is in another language, but
intralingual dubbing is probably more common. In this case, the replacing
dialogue is identical to the replaced dialogue, with the difference of being
produced after the filming of the scenes. The reason for intralingual dubbing
is to ensure sound quality, particularly on outdoor sets. For the purposes of
this survey, however, we will only concern ourselves with interlingual dubbing, as this is the kind that involves translation.
Just as subtitling has its media-specific constraints, which will be described later (3.3.3), dubbing has constraints which can be very complex
indeed. Most of these are to do with various forms of synchronization, and
these have been described thoroughly by e.g. Chaume (2004b). The most
obvious form of synchronization is lip-synch, the matching of the words to
the characters’ lip movements. In extreme close-ups, this needs to be quite
8
rigorous to meet standards of quality, especially when it comes to open vowels and labial consonants (Chaume 2004b: 41). Chaume lists two more forms
of synchrony, namely kinetic synchrony, which matches the voices with the
characters’ body movements, and isochrony, which matches the length of the
dubbed utterance to the length of the original utterance (2004b: 41).
From the audience’s perspective, the use of dubbing has the comfortable
advantage of hearing everything in their own language. From a production
perspective, it has the economic disadvantage of being about 15 times as
expensive as subtitling, according to Luyken et al. (1991: 105). Dries (1995:
14) advises that Luyken et al’s figures should not be over-emphasized, as
they are based on a European average, and the cost of dubbing varies a great
deal between countries. Also, even if Luyken et al’s study might be the most
comprehensive of its kind, it is somewhat dated by now. Dries’s own study
indicates a more current difference, with dubbing being ten times as expensive as subtitling (1995: 30). The reason for the difference in cost is that,
apart from the translating and editing of the script, dubbing requires a whole
new cast of dubbing actors. From a language political perspective, dubbing
has been described as nationalistic or protectionist. For instance, in Italy, the
Fascist government forbade the use of any language other than Italian on the
silver screen in the 1930’s (Guardini 1998:91). In their historical overview
of AVT, Ivarsson and Carroll write:
Dubbing was favoured in countries with very strong nationalistic currents
where vehement defence of the national language was common. These voices
had been heard for centuries in France and Spain and were even more forceful in the recently united countries of Germany and Italy. With the rise of
Fascism in Italy and Spain and once the Nazis took power in Germany, legislation was introduced in these countries sanctioning dubbing and forbidding
or limiting subtitling. In France of the 1930’s only ten of the country’s 4000
cinemas were permitted to show subtitled films. […] These countries have
stayed strongholds of dubbing until today. (1998: 10–11)
The historical coincidence of the advent of the talkies and the instalment of
Fascist or Nazi governments in three of the four main dubbing countries in
Europe is thus used to explain why these countries use dubbing as their main
form of AVT today. The weakness of the argument is that France was never
Fascist, even if French linguistic protectionism is well known. The economic
argument coincides with the historical argument, at least for Western
Europe. As the cost of dubbing is so great, it only makes economic sense to
dub if the language community is large enough. This would explain why
Spain is a dubbing country, while its neighbour Portugal is a subtitling country. There are fierce arguments both on the side of subtitling and on the side
of dubbing (cf. Gottlieb 1997: 55ff, Diaz Cintas 1999, and Kilborn 1989,
1993). In the end, the choice probably boils down to what the viewers are
used to, and it is as hard to make a French person read in the cinema, as it is
9
to make a Dane suspend her/his linguistic disbelief. Lately, however, it has
been easier to find cinemas showing subtitled films in Germany.
In Scandinavia, dubbing is almost exclusively found in films and TV programmes for pre-school children and cartoons and computer-animated feature films like Shrek (2001) or Toy Story (1995). Lately, however, animated
films from Disney, Dreamworks and similar studios are now released in both
dubbed and subtitled versions in Scandinavia, when in 1990, only the
dubbed versions were available.
3.2.3 Voice-over
As the name suggests, voice-over is a translation superimposed on the original dialogue. The original dialogue is toned done (but still audible) and one
or two speakers read a translation of the original dialogue. Normally, this
translation method is slightly asynchronous, giving the audience a few syllables of the original dialogue at the beginning and the end of each utterance
unimpeded, without any TL voice-over, presumably to give the audience a
chance to hear what the original sounds like and who the speaker is.
Voice-over could be described as a budget form of dubbing, as it does not
involve a full cast of dubbing actors; one or two speakers can do the job.
According to Luyken et al’s somewhat dated figures, the cost of voice-over
is about 1/7 of dubbing, but still twice as expensive as subtitling (1991: 105).
On the other hand, voice-over – unlike dubbing, but like subtitling – is an
overt form of translation, as the original is audible in the background.
Today, voice-over is mainly used for TV translation in Eastern Europe,
e.g. in Poland and Russia, where it is almost exclusively used for foreign
language programming on TV. It can occasionally be found in Western
Europe as well. In documentaries and news reporting, e.g. on CNN, when a
person speaking some ‘exotic’ language is seen on screen, voice-over is often the preferred mode of AVT. This is particularly true of translation into
English. In Scandinavia, these situations normally call for subtitling. In
Denmark, and sometimes in Sweden, what is called third-person voice over
(i.e. the narrator reads the translation in third person, rather than ‘pretending’
to be the person seen on screen; Gottlieb 2001: 78) is used for children’s
programming from other Scandinavian countries. A case in point is the
popular Swedish Astrid Lindgren stories, which are very often voiced-over
when aired in Denmark. Apart from Pippi Longstocking et al, voice-over is
rare in Scandinavia today, even if it was part of the origin of Scandinavian
television. Gottlieb and Grigaravičiūt÷ (1999/2001: 76) describes the following situation from TV’s infancy in Denmark:
Before introducing subtitles in 1955 […] DR, Danish national TV had its
(few) foreign films translated by a film professor who read all the lines offscreen to a small, but enthusiastic Danish audience. However, this practice
10
was cancelled after the (male) professor had done his best to render three
French girls in an agitated discussion […]. Then the director general of DR
interfered, and since that day no feature films have been voiced-over on Danish TV.
3.3 Subtitling
Even though both dubbing and, to a lesser extent, voice-over, occur in Scandinavia, subtitling is by far the AVT of choice in the Nordic countries and
the rest of the present study will, as its name indicates, deal with Scandinavian subtitles. Furthermore, apart from what was said about intralingual subtitling in 3.1.1, it will deal with interlingual subtitling, i.e. subtitling that
includes translation. Thus, ‘subtitling’ will henceforth be used as an abbreviation of ‘interlingual subtitling’, unless otherwise specified. A distinction
will also be made between process and product. The term ‘subtitling’ will be
used about the activity of producing subtitles, and also about the field in
general. The term ‘subtitles’ will be used about the end product of the process of subtitling, i.e. the subtitles themselves.
I will refrain from writing a historical description of the development of
subtitling in Scandinavia or elsewhere. Instead, the reader is referred to
Ivarsson (2002), Ivarsson and Carroll (1998: 9–32), Gottlieb (1994: 13–28,
1997: 49–68, 2001: 29–34) and Tveit (2004: 23–27). However, in chapter 5,
a short diachronic investigation of the development of Scandinavian subtitling norms of the last twenty-odd years will be made. Also, in chapter 8
there will be a brief diachronic discussion, as this is of importance to the
main investigation in the present study. Furthermore, I will not make any
survey of the different media for which subtitling is used in Scandinavia
today, even if there are interesting differences in the techniques and norms
which govern subtitling for the cinema, DVD and TV. For an exposé on
subtitling for these media, the reader is referred to Ivarsson and Carroll
(1998: 19–32, 63–71) or Bartoll (2004). The focus in this section, as indeed
in the rest of the present study, will be on television subtitles.
3.3.1 The nature of subtitles
If you ask the man on the street, or rather on the TV couch, what subtitles
are, you are likely to get an answer that sounds something like this: “Subtitles are lines at the bottom of the screen that display a translation of the dialogue.” Even though this definition is easily accessible, for the present purposes, it is clearly inadequate, and it can also be shown to be erroneous.
First, a subtitle could be one single line, or it could be any number of lines.
In theory, you could cover the whole screen with subtitles, even if that would
be rather pointless. Normally a subtitle consists of one or two lines (referred
11
to as a one-liner or a two-liner, respectively), but it could occasionally consist of three lines. Second, the lines need not be at the bottom of the screen.
In Japan, for instance, subtitles are sometimes placed vertically on the side
of the screen (Gottlieb 2001: 15). That never happens in Scandinavia, but
occasionally, subtitles may be placed in other positions than at the bottom of
the screen, for instance if there is a risk of their blocking something important in the picture there. For instance, subtitles (or supertitles?) displaying
the name and occupation of the speaker could be placed in the top left-hand
corner of the screen. Third, as explained in section 3.1.1, the texts in intralingual subtitles are not translations. Finally, the subtitles do not only display
the dialogue; instead they reproduce any verbal material in the ST. Not infrequently, subtitles show written material from the ST, e.g. captions, street
signs, headlines or letters.
Gottlieb has a much more accurate semiotic definition. According to him,
subtitling is:
A. Prepared communication
B. using written language
C. acting as an additive
D. and synchronous semiotic channel,
E. and as part of a transient
F. and polysemiotic text.5
(2001: 15, emphasis in the original)
Each of the emphasized words in this definition serves to differentiate subtitling from other forms of translation. A contrasts subtitling with simultaneous interpretation, but does not work very well for live subtitling (cf. 3.1.1.1
above). B contrasts subtitling with dubbing and voice-over. C contrasts subtitling with dubbing or literary translation, as subtitling adds a semiotic
channel of information, whereas dubbing replaces an existing channel. D
refers to the notion that subtitles should come on screen at the exact moment
when an utterance starts, and ideally end at the end of an utterance. Very
often though, subtitles tend to linger somewhat after the end of an utterance,
unless the constraints of the dialogue prohibit it. Subtitling is thus less synchronous than dubbing, which ideally should match the original utterance
word for word, and sometimes even phoneme for phoneme. Like D, E contrasts subtitling with literary translation and refers to the fact that the subtitles follow the image and disappear after reading. Unlike the case of literary
translation, the TV viewer cannot go back and reread a part of the text that
s/he has missed or misunderstood. This explains why individual subtitles
should as far as possible be syntactically and semantically self-contained (cf.
5
This definition does not say anything about translation; it is open to both intra- and interlingual subtitling.
12
points 4–7 of the Code of Good Subtitling Practice, Ivarsson and Carroll
1998: 157). F also contrasts subtitling with literary translation, but says more
about the medium in which it occurs.
The concept of the polysemiotic text has been developed by Gottlieb on
many occasions. According to Gottlieb, “[t]he term ‘polysemiotic’ refers to
the presence of two or more parallel channels of discourse constituting the
text in question” (2004: 227). Gottlieb divides a polysemiotic text, such as a
feature film or television programme, into four distinguishable semiotic
channels. These are:
1.
2.
3.
4.
Verbal audio: the dialogue and its paraverbal elements
Non-verbal audio: (background) music and sound effects
Verbal video: displays and captions
Non-verbal video: composition and montage
(Gottlieb 1997: 143, my translation)
Subtitles primarily interact with the two verbal channels, editing and translating them (or editing and transcribing them, in the case of intralingual subtitling). However, intralingual subtitling may also transcribe the non-verbal
audio channel and all subtitling should be in harmony with the flow of the
non-verbal video channel.
Interlingual subtitling is unique in that the message is not only transferred
from one language to another, but also from one mode to another: from the
spoken mode (usually) to the written mode. Gottlieb has called this semiotic
jaywalking (2001: 16), in that it does not go straight from spoken SL to spoken TL, as in interpreting, nor from written SL to written TL, as in literary
translation, nor straight from the spoken to the written code of the SL or the
TL as would be the case in transcription. Instead, interlingual subtitling
“jaywalks” or crosses over from SL spoken mode to TL written mode. So,
whereas literary translation or interpreting are horizontal in nature, interlingual subtitling is diagonal. Intralingual subtitling, on the other hand, could
be described as vertical, as it is a form of (edited) transcription.
The move from the spoken to the written format brings with it a necessity
for editing: “[…] the deletion or condensation of redundant, oral features is a
necessity when crossing over from speech to writing” (Gottlieb 2001: 20).
This is particularly true when it comes to spontaneous, non-scripted speech.
In fact, when many people see a carefully made verbatim transcript of their
own spontaneous utterances, they see it as near gibberish, so a certain reduction due to the semiotic transfer from one medium to another is probably a
good thing. Otherwise, “the audience would be taken aback by reading the
oddities of spoken discourse” (Gottlieb 1997: 113). This may not be true to
such a high degree when dealing with the scripted speech of fiction. After
all, we are dealing with a ‘polysemiotic U-turn’ there, from written script to
oral performance and back to written subtitles.
13
3.3.2 The subtitling process
The preceding section discussed the semiotic nature of the medium of subtitling. This section will discuss the practical reality of subtitling. Bearing in
mind that there is a great deal of variation in the working processes and conditions of individual subtitlers, what I call the ‘subtitling situation’, I will
here try to outline the process of subtitling. This will be done very briefly, as
the object is not to instruct anyone in how to become a subtitler (there are
more suitable texts for that, e.g. Ivarsson and Carroll 1998, Tveit 2004 and
any number of in-house guidelines), but rather to explain some of the terms
and notions that will surface in later parts of the present study. In this section, as in the rest of the present study, I will primarily concern myself with
subtitling for television, even if the subtitling of DVDs, cinema releases,
corporate videos, video games etc. is fairly similar (cf. Ivarsson and Carroll
1998: 63–71 for some of the more important differences).6 The outline of the
process in this section is based on my own experiences as a subtitler, prescriptive guidelines, and the accounts of other subtitlers, notably Wildblood
(2002), Pollard (2002) and Ivarsson (2002).
The process starts with a subtitling company procuring a commission
from a broadcaster to subtitle a film or a TV programme. Traditionally,
when the originator of the process is a public service broadcaster, this first
step has been left out, as they have had their own in-house subtitlers, but that
is now changing. For the commercial sphere, the commission is normally
awarded to the lowest bidder. The subtitling company subcontracts the
commission to a freelance subtitler, who receives either a digital file or an
analogue VHS tape of the film to use as the basis of her/his translation. The
subtitler also often, though not always, receives a script of the dialogue as an
auxiliary source of information. More often than not, these scripts are not the
original screenplays, but post-production transcripts, which record any
changes to the original screenplay and thus give a rendering of the final version of the film. However, these transcripts are often unreliable, and subtitlers are told to give priority to the film itself. Superimposed on the film is
an electronic time code, which could be said to be an electronic clock, that
starts at the beginning of the film, and then counts hours, minutes, seconds
and frames. There are 25 picture frames to a second in European television
(Ivarsson and Carroll 1998: 141). A frame could thus be said to be used as a
measure of time in subtitling, representing 1/25 of a second. The reason for
having frames, rather than fractions of seconds as the smallest unit of time is
perhaps obviously of a practical nature. Even though film appears to be moving pictures (i.e. ‘movies’), it is not continuous, but a rapid succession of still
pictures, technically known as frames.
6
These differences are mainly of a technical character, such as different reading speeds and
more use of one-liners and a different airing process in the cinema, as the subtitles are etched
into the film itself; cf. Ivarsson 2002.
14
The next step in the process is the subtitling itself. The subtitler has a
multitude of tasks to juggle (cf. e.g. Nørgaard 1989 or Gottlieb 2001: 41–
52). The most important ones are to segment the ST into coherent subtitles,
to translate the subtitles into the TL and to cue the subtitles onto the electronic time code, so that the subtitles appear and disappear on the screen at
the proper time. This last task is known by a number of terms, e.g. spotting,
cueing and time-coding. ‘Cueing’ will be the term used henceforth. Nowadays, most subtitlers work from home, using one of a number of PC-based
software programmes for subtitling. The film can either be integrated with
the programme, in which case the cueing can be done as you translate, or the
subtitler can work with twin screens, segmenting and translating first, and
then cueing the subtitles onto the time code later. The process can also be
done the other way around, so the segmenting and cueing is done first and
the translation is done afterwards. The software programmes have perks that
assist the subtitlers in their task, by indicating whenever a line becomes too
long, or ‘nudging’ the original cueing so it coincides with scene changes.
Modern software also has voice detection functions, which help the subtitler
align the subtitles exactly to the soundtrack. These improvements in technology, in combination with shorter deadlines and heavier workloads have
shortened the preparation time for one hour of (intralingual) subtitled programming from approximately 40 hours in 1980 to less than ten hours today,
according to Lambourne (2006). He also points to another related and
equally important trend in the subtitling process, namely that prices of (intralingual) subtitling have been cut by two thirds since 1990.
The result of the subtitling activity is an electronic subtitle file, with the in
and out times of the subtitles marked. Converted into a normal text file, the
result can look like the extracted example below:
00:08:25:16
00:08:32:00
Hun vil hellere steges levende end
gå om bord i din stinkende jolle igen!
00:08:32:04
00:08:37:00
Vær du glad for,
jeg ikke giver dig en endefuld!
The example shows how the first subtitle begins at 8 minutes, 25 seconds
and 16 frames (i.e. 0.64 seconds) after the beginning of the film (in this case
The Piano) and stays on the air for slightly more than 6 seconds, until 8
minutes and 32 seconds after the beginning of the film. There is then a gap
of four frames (i.e. 0.16 seconds) before the next subtitle comes on. There is
always a very small gap like this between subtitles; otherwise the viewers
might not notice that another subtitle has appeared. The next subtitle then
15
comes on at 8 minutes, 32 seconds and 4 frames, and stays on until 8 minutes and 37 seconds.7
The subtitler has other tasks, apart from segmenting, cueing and translating. The most important one could be called editing, which means that the
subtitler needs to adapt the text in the subtitles, so that it meets the spatial
and temporal constraints of the medium. I will return to this issue in the next
section, and again in chapter 5, but as a rule, this means reducing or condensing the verbal content in the original polysemiotic text.
Another task of the subtitler is to research the ST. This includes checking
the spelling of any names or other verbal material that are to be retained in
the TT. It also means making sure that any references, cultural or otherwise,
in the ST are represented in the subtitles in a coherent way, and making sure
that the subtitler understands all aspects of the ST in order to render such
references in an accurate way in the subtitles. In highly topical programming, such as current affairs programmes and topical talk shows, researching
takes up a considerable amount of the subtitler’s time.
The subtitler then proofreads and re-edits the subtitling file (often several
times) before handing it back to the subtitling company. In many cases, the
subtitling company has an editor who revises the subtitling file, looking for
errors and discrepancies. This person can also occasionally be called upon to
do the cueing of the segmented and translated text. As of November 2006,
revising (and also reviewing, if so required) by someone other than the subtitler is a mandatory step in the subtitling process for any company certified
to meet European standards of translation quality (BS EN ISO 9000: 2005
and BS EN 15038: 2006). However, there were no such companies in Scandinavia when the present survey was carried out.
The final step of the process is then that the subtitling file is turned over
to the original commissioner, who broadcasts the subtitle file (or files, as
international channels, such as the Discovery channel, may air in up to eight
languages simultaneously (cf. Pollard 2002: 26)) along with the ST, in the
case of TV subtitles. Synchrony between the ST and the subtitles is secured
through the use of the electronic time code. It has been known to happen that
the time code is broken and/or is erroneous, in which case the match will be
incomplete. In that case, the subtitles will not fit the utterances on the screen,
which is possibly the most annoying subtitling error of all. However, this can
normally be sorted out during the airing process (cf. Pollard 2002: 26).
3.3.2.1 Central cueing
The process described above is much simpler than it was as recently as
twenty years ago (cf. e.g. Ivarsson 2002), but as each step in the process
adds to the cost of the final product, there is an incentive among commercial
7
It is a mere coincidence that both subtitles disappearance coincides with whole seconds and
zero frames. The out-time of a subtitle can be at any number of frames.
16
subtitling companies to simplify it even further. This has been done through
a process that I, for want of a better term, call ‘central cueing’, which basically means that the cueing is done centrally, rather than by individual subtitlers. Central cueing is highly relevant to the present study, as its effects on
TTs and on national norms of subtitling is substantial, and this will be further discussed in chapter 5 and 8.
When subtitling DVDs, subtitlers are often provided with a so-called
‘Genesis’ file (cf. e.g. Gardner 2005: 30), which is basically an intralingual
subtitling file of the ST. The advantage of this is that the segmentation and
cueing have already been done, allowing the subtitler to focus on translating,
thus minimizing the cost for each translation, by removing the burden of two
of the subtitlers’ main tasks. This is also done when subtitling for television,
but here, a Genesis file is rarely used. Instead a first-generation translation is
used as ‘master template file’. This means that a first-generation subtitler
carries out all the tasks described above. The resulting subtitling file is then
given to second-generation subtitlers, who can focus on producing translations into other TLs without having to bother about segmentation or cueing.
In this way, a great deal of time and money is saved. I came into contact
with the process as a subtitler and the process was further explained to me by
Johan Norberg of SDI Media (p.c., September 2004).
In the early days of central cueing, there were some positive reactions to it
(cf. e.g. Ivarsson 1989: 107), because of the savings in time and money it
afforded. However, there have been many negative reactions as well. One
effect of central cueing is that apart from the time code, the original translation is normally also sent to the second-generation subtitlers, who may use it
as a pivot translation8 or choose to ignore it and work straight from the ST.
As the Scandinavian languages are broadly mutually intelligible (at least in
their written forms), it is very common for subtitlers to use the firstgeneration translation as pivot translations, as it saves them much of the
labour of editing. The second-generation translation is then just written into
the same subtitles as the first-generation translation, replacing it. In these
cases, the first-generation translation could in fact be considered the ST (or
at least a co-ST) of the second-generation translation. There are a number of
drawbacks associated with pivot translation, as it makes the TT one step
further removed from the ST (cf. e.g. Gottlieb and Grigaravičiūt÷ 1999 or
Zilberdik 2004). However, most of these appear only when the translator’s
knowledge does not include the SL, but only the language of the pivot translation, and this is rarely the case in central cueing. On the contrary, as master
template files used in e.g. Croatia may be produced in Sweden, or vice versa,
and most commercially successful films today tend to be in English, quite
the opposite is true. However, in Scandinavia most master template files are
8
A pivot translation is a translation from which other translations are made, rather than making these translations directly from the ST; cf. section 2.1.
17
in another Scandinavian language, and as a result of poor proofreading, you
sometimes find traces of the first-generation translation in the secondgeneration subtitles. In the main corpus of the present study, there are a few
lines of Norwegian in the Swedish subtitles of The Simple Life (8: 8.25).
One beneficial effect of central cueing is that you get an extra second
reader (the second-generation subtitler) who scrutinizes the first-generation
subtitles, and who may spot and report any errors in them, unless it has already been aired. This might have been the case with a centrally cued film in
the main corpus of this study (What Women Want), where the Swedish firstgeneration translation had four rather serious translation errors, which were
all gone in the Danish second-generation translation. One less beneficial
effect is that the pivot translation may itself be a source of translation errors,
as in an oft-cited example (from “bøfsiden” www.titlevision.com). Here,
‘breakfast sausage’ turned into a Danish term corresponding to ‘lunch basket’ through interference from a Swedish pivot translation, as the Swedish
word for ‘breakfast sausage’ (frukostkorv) is very similar to the Danish word
for ‘lunch basket’ (frokostkurv). The work of the second-generation subtitlers is perhaps less interesting than first-generation subtitling, which may
cause some of these peculiarities. With the segmenting, cueing and editing
(and pragmatically speaking also the research) removed from the task, what
is left is less challenging. The second-generation subtitlers may feel that they
are not producing any original work, hence the tendency of not crediting
second-generation subtitlers.9
Whether or not the first-generation translation is used as a pivot translation, the centrally cued time code must be used by the second-generation
subtitlers, who may, but rarely do, alter it, unless a serious error is discovered in it. That means that the cueing of the time code is not changed to
match any national norms or individual subtitlers’ preferences. This tendency has caused some concern in the subtitling world (cf. e.g. Imhauser
2002: 23). The effect of central cueing on national norms will be investigated empirically in chapter 5.
The logical next step after employing central cueing is of course to use
translation memories and even machine translation for going from the firstgeneration to the second-generation translations. There have been experiments with machine translation into other Nordic languages from a firstgeneration translation, which I was involved in some years ago, but the results were discouraging. Still, machine translation keeps developing, and
new techniques using statistical analysis and translation memory are explored for these purposes, which are showing greater success rates (cf. Volk
and Harder 2007 or Armstrong et al 2007).
9
Subtitlers (and subtitling companies) are normally credited, most often by having their name
appear in a separate subtitle when the end credits start or when the name of the scriptwriters
of the ST appears.
18
3.3.3 Constraints of subtitling
The constraints of subtitling are so marked and so common as to seem constitutive, resulting in subtitling being called “constrained translation” (Titford 1982). It has later been shown that other forms have their constraints as
well (e.g. by Chaume (2004b) for dubbing), and if you take such paratextual
considerations as deadlines into account, it is probably safe to say that all
forms of translation are constrained. However, the constraints of subtitling
are what Gottlieb calls “infamous” (2004: 219), and many translation decisions that are made in subtitling would be incomprehensible without knowledge of these, so they will be surveyed briefly in this section. One constraint
has already been discussed (in section 3.3.1 above), namely the issue of the
semiotic switch from spoken to written language, which brings with it thorough editing of (spontaneous) speech. Another issue is the spatial and temporal constraints and the condensation that these bring with them.
3.3.3.1 Spatial and temporal constraints
The spatial constraints of subtitling are based on the simple fact that you can
only fit a certain number of characters into a line, and that you can rarely use
more than two lines in each subtitle. At this point, it should perhaps be
pointed out that the character and not the word is considered the basic unit in
subtitling, as a word can be any number of characters.10 It should also be
pointed out that a ‘character’ could be defined as any visible result produced
by pressing a keyboard key. This means that in subtitling e.g. commas, full
stops, dashes, exclamation marks and blank spaces are also characters.
The number of characters that can be fitted into a single line varies, depending on a few factors. In subtitling, italics need more space than unmarked text. Capital letters are very bulky, and ‘m’ and ‘w’ take up more
space than ‘i’ and ‘l’ (cf. Ivarsson and Carroll 1998: 44). In academic texts
on subtitling, there is quite a range as to how many characters you can fit
into a line; Schröter (2005: 27) states a range of 30–40, Tveit gives 38 as a
Scandinavian maximum (2004: 107) whereas Luyken et al (1991: 43) gives
28–38 as being the most common figures. It should be noted that the low
figure of 28 stated by Luyken et al may be caused by its being the oldest of
these sources and that for technological reasons, subtitled lines used to be
shorter before the process was completely computerized. Current Scandinavian guidelines give a maximum of 35 characters per line (fewer if italics are
used), but in actual fact, you regularly come across lines that are longer. In
the main corpus of the present study, there are examples of lines with as
many as 42 characters. In view of this, and to have a round number for calculations, a full line of contemporary subtitling in the present study is considered to have 36 characters, and a full two-liner 72 characters, even if that
10
However, in a background study (Pedersen 2003a: 8) I found that the average length of a
word in soaps and sitcoms, in both SL (English) and TL (Swedish), is circa five characters.
19
is in the upper half of the scales given above. For older subtitles, a shorter
line of 28–32 characters is considered normal. It should, however, be borne
in mind that most lines are not full.
The temporal constraints are closely linked to the spatial ones, in that the
message contained in the lines needs to be displayed for a certain amount of
time (the so called display or exposure time) in order for the viewer to be
able to read it. Generally speaking, most writers in the field consider some
three seconds for a full one-liner (de Linde and Kay 1999: 7) and six seconds
for a two-liner (Ivarsson and Carroll 1998: 64f) for TV subtitles something
of an average. Gottlieb notes a limit of 12 characters per second, something
which has been called the 12 cps rule. That means that a full two-liner, i.e.
72 characters should stay on the screen for 6 seconds (72/12 = 6) in order for
90% of the viewers to be able to read it (Gottlieb 2001: 20). Reality is more
complicated than this, however, as you normally are supposed to take the TT
audience into account. Children’s programming is often given longer exposure times, because of the reduced reading speed of the TT audience. Also,
the nature of the TT affects reading speeds: complex lexis and syntax require
longer exposure time. The polysemiotic nature of the medium also affects
reading speed. If there is much information coming through the non-verbal
video channel (as is the case in action-packed scenes), the viewers’ reading
speed is lowered by their attention being focussed on the picture. Conversely, if the verbal audio channel coincides with the subtitles to a high
extent (as it would if e.g. long names and titles are retained in the subtitle),
the intersemiotic redundancy offers a possibility to raise reading speeds.
However, I know of no research into whether these factors are actually taken
into consideration in real life.
3.3.3.2 Condensation
In Gottlieb’s defining features of subtitling (cf. 3.3.1 above), there is no
mention of condensation, which some might find surprising. Yet condensation (or the slightly more negative term ‘reduction’) is not a necessary property of subtitling; it is just very common. Because of the constraints of subtitling, all the verbal content in the ST cannot always be represented in the
subtitles. Something usually has to be left out, or rather: the remaining TT
message has to be edited so as to (ideally) say the same thing, in fewer
words (or at least in fewer characters), as the ST, and that is what is meant
by condensation.
Even if condensation is extremely common, there are a few cases when
no condensation is needed. This is often the case when captions are subtitled,
or when the dialogue is very slow. In the last instance, there are also examples of expansion of the original utterance in order to maintain a consistent
pace in the subtitles (cf. Wildblood 2002: 41). This is, however, rare, and
even slow speech is often condensed slightly as a result of the switch from
spoken to written language.
20
The condensation rate varies, depending on the pace and complexity of
the dialogue. According to Gottlieb, “[e]specially with up-tempo speech, the
subtitler may choose to sacrifice close to 50 % of the dialogue – measured in
quantitative terms [i.e. a simple word count of ST and TT] – in order not to
exceed the normal television ‘speed limit’” (2001: 20). I have found examples of extremely rapid and nonsensical speech being reduced by 75% of the
original (in the sitcom Little Britain, BBC). However, these are extremes,
and the average condensation rate is much lower. A Norwegian study of
subtitling of feature films (Lomheim 1995, quoted by Gottlieb 2001: 57)
shows a quantitative reduction of 22–35%. De Linde and Kay (1999: 51)
found quite different results in their investigation of British subtitles for the
deaf and hard of hearing. There, the mean condensation rate was as high as
43%. In a background study for the present study, I found that the average
condensation rate was 31%, which is well in line with the Norwegian figures, and also consistent with more sweeping generalisations of “a third”
found in the literature on subtitling (cf. e.g. Gottlieb 1997: 73). It is less consistent with the British findings, but this is probably due to the fact that they
studied subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing. Intralingual subtitles often
come at a slower pace, because “in general deaf people do not read written
text as quickly as hearing people” (de Linde and Kay 1999: 19; cf. section
3.4.1. above), and this results in more condensation. Also, subtitling strategies in Britain differ from the ones used by Scandinavians. For instance, in
the UK subtitles can appear before the beginning of the utterance they translate, and this hardly ever happens in Scandinavian subtitling practice.
These figures suggest that the TT audience misses out on much of what is
said in the ST, but the situation is not as bad as it seems. The quantitative
condensation rate may average a third, but Gottlieb has shown that there is
not a qualitative loss of information of the same amount. Instead, what is
condensed is spoken language features, such as repetitions and false starts,
so-called “intrasemiotic redundancy” (1997: 101). De Linde (1995) agrees
and claims that the reductions in subtitling are not random in this respect, but
systematic. Also, fortunately, the viewers can pick up much of what is lost in
the condensation of dialogue through other channels, mainly through pictorial information. Because of this so-called “intersemiotic redundancy”
(Gottlieb 1997: 101), the viewers are compensated through other channels,
so the total loss of information is not as dire as the quantitative figures suggest.
The condensation rate does not vary only according to the speed and
complexity of dialogue, or as a result of the smaller intrasemiotic redundancy of scripted speech, but also according to national norms, as could be
seen from the discussion of de Linde and Kay’s figures.
21
3.3.4 A contract of illusion
In Pedersen (forthcoming b), I introduce the idea of a tacit contract of illusion, which I will expand on here, as it is highly pertinent to both the nature
of subtitling and to the present study. It is based on the nature of watching
subtitled television. Let me first quote Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Whenever
we encounter an object of art, like a statue, a painting or a poem, we make
use of “the willing suspension of disbelief for the moment that constitutes
poetic faith” (1817/1985: 314). Serious spectators tend to enjoy the beauty of
Venus de Milo, and not to make the complaint that her armless state makes
her unrealistic. The same is true when we watch fiction on television, or go
to the cinema. For instance, “[i]n any fiction film the spectator knows very
well that the actor and character are not the same, yet at the same time must
believe that they are for the film to work” (De Cordova 1986: 132). The
same goes for the story, the setting etc. The viewer may well know that
M*A*S*H was filmed in the Rocky Mountains, but disregards that knowledge, and pretends that what s/he is seeing took place in Korea. Or the
viewer can easily realize that Forrest Gump could not possibly have run
across America an absurd number of times without even changing his shoes,
but disregards this realization to get more pleasure from the film. In other
words, the viewer has to suspend his/her disbelief in order to enjoy the film.
I propose that the viewers extend this suspension of disbelief to the subtitles. There is a tacit agreement, a ‘contract of illusion’ if you will, between
the subtitler and the viewers to the effect that the subtitles are the dialogue,
that what you read is actually what people say.11 In reality, of course, it is
not. For one thing, the verbal material is in another mode, writing instead of
speech, and this means that the code is also changed from spoken to written.
In practice this means that only a few oral forms are retained in the subtitles.
The language is cleaned up; more often than not, hesitations, false starts etc.
are excluded (cf. section 3.3.1 above). Furthermore, there is the condensation
issue. What you read is on average about a third shorter than what people say
(cf. 3.3.3 above). And even more strikingly, in interlingual subtitling, what is
written is in another language from what is said. Taking all this into account
means that it requires quite a good deal of willing suspension of disbelief for
the viewers to sign the contract of illusion. In Scandinavia though, people
grow up with subtitling, and the contract of illusion is something they have
internalized.
So, the viewers are willing to suspend their disbelief, and as part of their
commitment to the contract of illusion, the subtitlers have traditionally tried
to make their work as unobtrusive as possible. From this practice comes the
focus on a “transparent” (Gottlieb 2001: 51) translation, or as Lindberg puts
it at the end of his guidelines for Danish subtitlers: “good subtitles are those
11
This is similar to the “suspension of linguistic disbelief” found in dubbing by Romero
Fresco (2006).
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you never notice” (my translation, italics in the original). Swedish guidelines
also encourage this contract of illusion by giving advice such as “[T]hink
[…]: How would a Swede express herself in the same situation?” (LanguageLand 23, emphasis removed). Domesticating advice like this results in
a fluent TT of the kind so scorned by Venuti:
Fluency assumes a theory of language as communication that, in practice,
manifests itself as stress on immediate intelligibility and an avoidance of
polysemy, or indeed any play of the signifier that erodes the coherence of the
signified. (1995: 60)
I am not saying that fluency is always the best translation strategy, but the
transient (cf. 3.3.1 above) nature of subtitling makes “immediate intelligibility” a necessity. Television viewers do not have the option of going back to
make sense of a resistant TT.
Fluency does not necessarily mean domestication, though. The guidelines
of the Swedish public service broadcaster, SVT, actively discourage excessive domestication, as this might actually threaten the contract of illusion.
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