SUBTITLES

The aim of this website is to help you improve your foreign language skills through the practice of interlingual subtitling.  We anticipate that this practice will enhance your listening comprehension and translation skills, analytical and problem solving skills and intercultural awareness.

      Subtitling is the translation of film dialogue into text, usually displayed at the bottom of the screen.  Interlingual subtitles are subtitles in a language different from that of the film. It is not our objective to train you as a professional subtitler, although you will of course gain some knowledge of this practice and acquire some useful transferable IT skills.

      The activity of subtitling can be divided into three steps:

Spotting or defining the in/out time of the subtitle

Translating the dialogue of the film into another language

Adapting the translation so that the subtitle is not too long or too complex to read.

      However, we will not necessarily or always proceed in this order and different activities will involve different exercises. Generally speaking, you will be asked to watch a video clip [1], look at the transcript of the dialogue provided, translate it and insert your translation into the subtitling programme. You will then synchronize the translation with the speech and reduce/adapt each line so that the resulting subtitles can be easily read by the target audience.

It’s easy!

Isn’t it? In fact subtitling is an extremely challenging activity, but it can also be great fun! You will soon find that translating speech into written text is not as straightforward as it may seem. Spoken dialogue is often made up of interrupted sentences, repetitions, slang and other peculiarities which may not seem appropriate in written texts. And of course accents and intonation are not easily rendered in writing. As a general rule, syntax should be simplified; unusual word order should be avoided; complex structures revisited.

      But in a film/TV programme, communication does not happen just through speech. Music, sounds, image, signs on screen (i.e. shop names, street names, etc.), camera angle, light etc. all contribute to communicating the message of the film and may well have an impact on subtitles.

Technical constraints

Subtitles must not take up all of the audience’s attention to the detriment of the scene. The audience must be able to read and still have time to see what is happening on the screen. For that reason the number of characters and lines of subtitles is limited. Norms vary from country to country and there are also differences between TV and cinema subtitling. We will follow the guidelines for cinema subtitling, which are usually as follows:

      These guidelines are based on the reading speed of the “average” viewer (14-65 years old). If subtitles are kept for less than 1.5 seconds the audience will not have time to read them; if they stay on for too long, people will tend to read them twice, thereby disrupting the normal flow of conversation.

      Note that if a subtitle extends over two lines, the segmentation should not divide grammatical or sense units. For example:

Sport is central / to life at NUI Galway is to be preferred to Sport is central to / life at NUI Galway.

You will discover a lot more as you proceed. But, to start with, try out our First Approach activity. No sound, no translation. Use your imagination to give the characters a voice.

• Disclaimer
• Privacy
• Copyright
• Accessibility