Subtitles and noir...and shameless self-promotion

[Mark Nornes]

This is a fantastic point. The article is a great example of working  
by assumptions that are informed by market forces.

Actually, this issue?reading speed and comprehension?has been studied  
to death in the social sciences, particularly when it comes to subs  
for the hearing impaired. When I was researching this, I was amazed at  
the amount of research, much of it involving comprehension tests and  
rigging people into Clockwork Orange-like gizmos to track their eye  
movement. It's an international field, and it's probably be fair to  
say that the majority of the articles are published in Japan, in  
Japanese.

However, whenever you see translators discussing this (or their  
producers or managers of translation houses) it's evident that they  
don't know about all this work. They're just parroting the common  
sense they've been told over the years.

Looking at the Nikkei article, it does make sense, no? It's the  
increasing demand for dubbing (of children-oriented Hollywood  
blockbusters) that's generating this.

Markus






On May 12, 2008, at 1:34 PM, Aaron Gerow wrote:

> One question that came to mind reading that article on subtitling is  
> how this might relate to the use of telop in contemporary TV. I for  
> one can't quite accept the statement that "many young viewers are  
> finding this speed to be too daunting for their reading  
> comprehension" when contemporary TV variety shows feature such a  
> large number words on screen. Some like Kibun wa jojo (an Utchan  
> Nanchan show from a couple years back) presented every single word  
> spoken by all the characters plus additional commentary by some  
> external narrator. It was an awful lot to read and it went by at the  
> speed people talked. If anything, one would think today's youth are  
> MORE adept at quickly reading words on the screen. So could the  
> problem really be the lack of knowledge? Or could we say that  
> perhaps viewers of TV never actually read the telop, or at least not  
> for comprehension? Or are youth, now used to telop, expecting  
> subtitles that just repeat the dialogue, not translate it?
>
> Lots of questions, but I remain a bit suspicious about how this  
> "trend" is being described.
>
> Aaron Gerow
> Director of Undergraduate Studies, Film Studies Program
> Assistant Professor
> Film Studies Program/East Asian Languages and Literatures
> Yale University
> 53 Wall Street, Room 316
> PO Box 208363
> New Haven, CT 06520-8363
> USA
> Phone: 1-203-432-7082
> Fax: 1-203-432-6764
> e-mail: aaron.gerow at yale.edu
> site: www.aarongerow.com
>
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