Dubbing vs. Subtitling: Advantages, Disadvantages, and Historical Context, Appunti di Lingua Inglese

Scarica Dubbing vs. Subtitling: Advantages, Disadvantages, and Historical Context e più Appunti in PDF di Lingua Inglese solo su Docsity! Sesta lezione - 19.03 Dubbing and subtitling To Dub or to Subtitle? Some advantages of dubbing: - Lesstextualreduction + because we have to translate spoken dialogues so we don't have space or time constrains like in subtitles. The text is not that reduced like in subtitling. - Doesnot require high level of literacy from viewers > they don't have to read. In some countries they cannot use subtitles due to the law level of literacy. If they don't read they cannot use subtitles. - Viewer doesn’thave to divide attention > you don't have to split your attention between subtitles and the screen. Some disadvantages of dubbing: - Cost > dubbing is very expensive because there are many people involved. Cost is almost 15 times more expensive than subtitling, also because usually there are famous actors. - Time factor > all the process cannot afford a lot of time to translate the film because usually producers need the translation in a very short time. Itis different films from TV series: for film s they usually have a month to have everything (this means that in the process translators have 1 week or even less to translate a movie because they then have to pass their translation to the adaptor), while in the case of TV series the time is even shorter (sometimes they have one week to do everything, but they can also have only couple of days to translate a series, because they have to translate it, adapt it ecc.ecc.). - Perceived loss of authenticity > when we watch a dubbed movie we have this illusion of disbelief because we hear dialogues in our language, if is a good quality we forget that the movie is dubbed. Anyway, sometimes we can have this sense of loss of authenticity. That might happen that in an English movie some dialogues are spoken in Italian, so that when the translator have to translate those dialogues into Italian we perceive a loss of authenticity (the translator could paraphrase the Italian dialogue in the original version when translating into Italian, but this has no sense). - Discordance between visual and verbal > the multimodal element (images, gestures, music) is very important in dubbing. In dubbing sometimes we might lose the relationship between the visual and verbal. The adaptor has to pay attention to how some words are pronounced. - Constraintoflip-synchronization. The advantages of subtitling: The standard of English as a foreign language is much higher in subtitling countries such as the Netherlands or the Scandinavian countries than Germany, for instance. Subtitling is also a chance to learn or improve a language, in fact there are also some techniques used to teach a language using subtitles (there are some schools and universities that teach using subtitles). The ability in a language is better in those countries where subtitling is more evolved, like Scandinavian countries. 1. Cost > subtitling is cheaper than dubbing and are also faster (we can realize subtitles in one night). 2. Availability of relevant technology. 3. Standard ofliteracy. 4. Interestin foreign languages > interest in hearing and learning a foreign language. 5. Degree of cultural openness. 6. Strength oflocal film industry > in Italy we have a stoical tradition of dubbing (we have this tradition rooted in our country and this is not easy to change). 7. The audience’s habits > if the audience is used to dubbing or subtitling is not easy to change it * Priortosubtitle writing > the translator watches the video and writes down the seconds in which the subtitle has to be inserted, and then writes down the translation and inserts it. * Simultaneously > while we translate we insert the subtitles. After that, of course there has to be an editing/checking phase, and sometimes simulation in which we have to watch the video with the subtitles in order to see if there are spelling mistakes and if the synchronization and timing is correct. Fansubbing Is amateur subtitles. Was bornin 1980s because there were some people that wanted to watch anime with the subtitles, so they decided to make subtitles themselves. It begun with anime and then it spread all over Europe with TV series, films and so on. It caused frustration with the official distributors’ schedules for live action television programs (they wanted more time to produce subtitles - fansubbers are fast). Fansubber are volunteer subtitlers (now widely used by TED and Amara) and in 2018 in Italy the two main communities of fansubbing closed due to copyright reasons, even if now they started again to produce subtitles. There were also fights between fansubbers and official translators: in 2020 Netflix was caught using fansubbers in Finland in October 2012, and this is not fair or good because they stole fansubs from their community and use them. The first season of The Big Bang Theory in Italy was watched by people using fan subs; than when Mediaset (Italia 1) broadcasted the first season with Italian dubbing, these fans who already had watched the series with fansubs noticed some differences: they noticed that the dubbing was very different from the original, because Mediaset changed, censored and cut a lot of cultural references. So they wrote and sign a petition to the Italian production and for the second season all the team of translators and adapters of the Big Bang Theory was changed. Norms Subtitling's norms are very different from fan subbers's ones. * Orthographic norms > Suspension dots. ® Treatmentofdialect. * Treatmentofswearing > swearing is not used in subtitling but is used in fansubbing, because fansubbers want to transpose the cultural elements and idioms of the original version. The mission of fansubbing is to avoid censorship, so they use swearing. e Treatmentofthe cultural elements. * Useoftelevision channel guidelines from casting companies > in Italy we have the norms used by Rai for subtitling. These are official norms, very different from fansubbers. Censorship Is a common area of research particularly for dubbing. In Italy dubbing was born with fascism in order to protect the Italian language, heritage and culture; people were forced to watch movies with dubbing. Censorship is part of dubbing due to his history. ex1. Simpson > In Italy we have this common sense that Simpson are a cartoon for children because they are broadcast in the afternoon but they are not. In USA Simpson are in the evening because they contain a lot of swearing that we don't find in the Italian dubbing. ex2. Will and Grace > Censorship also for LGBT programs. ex.3 A very famous example in Italy of a TV series who has been completely changed in dubbing is The Nanny (La tata) > ha creato perfettamente l’illusione nello spettatore: storia della tata Francesca che viene da Frosinone. Se la si guarda attentamente, ci si renderà conto che ogni tanto compaiono simboli ebrei come un candelabro e un copricapo, e questo perché nella versione originale nei non è italiana e non si chiama Francesca, ma si chiama Fran, è ebrea-americana e non italiana. All'epoca i produttori hanno pensato che potesse attirare di più lo spettatore cambiare il personaggio e renderlo italiano. Oggi questo non si potrebbe fare perché lo si scoprirebbe subito, all’epoca no. Elisa Perego - experiment on the reception of subtitles (eye tracking). Participants were seated in a comfortable chair with eyes at a distance of approximately 60 cm from the screen and they were exposed to the 15-minute subtitled video excerpt. Headphones were used to minimize external noise and distraction. As previously explained, eye movements were collected for a randomly selected subset of participants. These participants watched the subtitled video after a short calibration procedure lasting less than half a minute (see below). No other change was applied to the basic procedure. This experiment was carried out in order to study the attention put by the audience in the subtitle and in the scene. Historical research Is a field of translation studies that tries to study how AVT developed from a technological point of view, how are norms in AVT changed (they changed a lot especially regarding to censorship), how might AVT have affected and influenced the fame of an audiovisual product. e Re-dubbing. * Re-subtitling of films (especially for DVDs). * Re-surtitling of opera. Applied research There are many fields of applied research in AVT: - Accessibility (is widely spread)> attention paid by scholars and professional to deaf and partially sighted people. - Creative subtitling or fan subbing > researches about differences of official dubbing and fansub of the product. - Studies about the relation between text and image > researches about the multimodal aspect of AVT. The studies in AVT are interdisciplinary, they don't deal just with translation. Chellenges: what film are we watching? When we watch a movie, we always have to look at the version (is a DVD? what version is? is a special edition? there's director’s cut? // Tv series: what television channel? The date? The original first broadcast?). Metadata are very important if you have to study the translation of a movie or episode. Films can be cut, digitally altered and so on, so we have to pay attention to what version we are studying. Sometimes, at the end of the movie, subtitler may be credited but it hardly ever happens: usually, only the company doing the dubbing/subtitling and the dubbers are mentioned. You will never read the names of the translators and adapters even if their job is fundamental. Some guidelines if we want to write an essay/thesis on an audiovisual product: - Alwayscite films in the bibliography in the same way that you would cite books. - Alwayscite the edition consulted and date of production as well as the original date of release of the film and the region. - Alwayscite the subtitler's name (where given) or subtitling lab, commonly provided.