Subtitling-A tool to understand for audience

Subtitling is the textual version of dialogue of films and television program displayed below the screen to help those who have interpretative problems.

Have you ever been satisfied watching movies in the language you do not understand? “Not really” would be the obvious reply. To provide the best available solution for this problem, subtitling is being used. It is all about the the textual versions of the dialogue in films and television programs displayed at below the main screen.

Subtitling Service is sought by people who are unable to understand the language and dialogue used in films and News show. It helps in bringing clear and vivid information to the audience particularly, those who do not understand the spoken dialog or have accent recognition problems. They can simply read the translated texts and catch up the meanings according to the actions displayed on the screen.

Sound representation is also provided for the people who have minor hearing hurdles. The importance of subtitling has immensely increased due to globalization; it can be seen due to cultural intermingling of people across the countries. For instance, several Hollywood movies are on the way to India and other countries. Bollywood movie from India are also welcome outside the country.

But for good interpretation of the stories relating to cultures needs subtitling done by experts individuals who have deep knowledge and language expression skills of the language spoken by targeted audience. Now a days, it has emerged as one of the areas which in future can mushroom a lot of career prospects looking the market scenario today. Gone are the days when people used to ignore others from outside, become conservative, but education wiped out all those mentalities they had. It has brought mutual understanding among the people, countries, and improved relations which accelerated frequent movement and traveling.

There came a time when people developed interests to learn and study foreign cultures which actually strengthened the interpretation sector and subtitling has come to play a bigger role in the pursuit of cultural education. Talking about the subtitling many experienced and language experts are making direct entry into this profession being lucrative and challenging. It requires a lot of hard work and creativity in this service because everything has to be described more precisely as per actions displayed on the screen. Hence, it can be said subtitling is not everybody’s cup of tea.


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Subtitling: A Real Art...

When we talk about what subtitling is, we can say in simple words that it is a printed translation. Which surely is true, but what if we take it as an art. You’ll not agree with me on the first place. When given some deep thoughts to it, nobody can deny the importance and skills required to be a subtitler.

On a simple note subtitling is one of the several processes commonly used in the translation of audio-visual products. It can be in the form of captions or simple subtitles shown at the bottom on the screen.

Subtitling is much cheaper than dubbing, and it takes less time, so it is common in smaller countries for which the audience is too small to justify dubbing on a large scale.

Now lets discuss it further.

From a linguistic point of view, subtitling can be divided into two types: a) Intralingual subtitling, also known as captioning, which is primarily aimed at the deaf and hard of hearing, but also extremely useful for people learning a foreign language; b) Interlingual subtitling, the spoken/written message of the original product which is translated into the language of the target audience. From technical point of view it can again be of two type: a) Open Subtitling, which refers to subtitles that appear permanently on screen and cannot be ‘switched off’ by the viewer; b) Closed subtitles, which the viewer can choose to see or not.

Translation of Subtitling is sometimes very different from the translation of written text. Usually, when a film or a TV program is subtitled, the subtitler watches the picture and listens to the audio sentence by sentence. As subtitling doesn’t just mean to translate the dialogue, thus other meaningful language in films such as signs, letters, captions and other written words are also an important area needed to be considered upon. When a film has lots of written language and dialogue happening together, this can result in some very difficult choices for the subtitler.The subtitler may or may not have access to a written transcript of the dialog. Especially in commercial subtitles, the subtitler often interprets what is meant, rather than translating how it is said, i.e. meaning being more important than form. The subtitler does this when the dialog must be condensed in order to achieve an acceptable reading speed.

The subtitler’s task is already difficult because subtitles are so limited in space (about 37 characters per line, and a maximum of two lines) and time (subtitles should not stay on the screen longer than six seconds). The result is that the content of the dialogue has to be cut down to fit in the subtitles. Not only that, but the content has to be translated, and the subtitles also have to be ‘spotted’ or timed carefully to match the dialogue.

The basic aim of any Translation is to reformulate a source language message in a given target language, avoiding at all costs any misunderstandings in the process. In other translation practices mistakes can easily pass unnoticed, but this is rarely the case in a mode of translation as uniquely vulnerable as subtitling. Hence it will no be incorrect to project subtitling as another real art form of contemporary time.