Text Reduction: Strategies Adopted in Audio Visual Subtitle Translation

Abstract

AVT (Audio Visual Translation), is one of the translation activities involving transfer of spoken and audial messages from the source text (ST) into written target texts (TT) to get displayed on digital screens. It is considered challenging because subtitle translation is constrained by the speed of spoken messages and the rolling of the digital screens. As a result, the translation work is bound to be limited in both number of characters and screen space in order to provide coherently reader-friendly texts. The constraints, consequently, compel the translators to use certain methods of translation called text reduction generally done through elimination, rendering, and condensation. This study is an attempt to find out what strategies are deployed in the subtitle translation process. Interview was also conducted to obtain first-hand information as regard the translator's reasons for using the strategies. The result shows that text reduction manifests in elimination, rendering, and condensation strategies as a part of constraint compliance. While interview result generally invigorates the above result, there is a striking finding that translators were also compelled to conform to the standard quality of the subtitles publishing company.

A Research of Subtitle Translation and International Communication of Chinese Cultural Documentary from the Perspective of Eco-Translatology

“…Subtitle translation belongs to audiovisual translation. Suratno & Wijaya (2018) believe that audiovisual translation means that the translator translates spoken and auditory information of source text into target text and displays it on a digital screen. Cintas & Remael (2014) point out that the screen space and time limitation of subtitle translation have a great impact on the readability of text.…”

Applying machine translation to Chinese–English subtitling: Constraints and challenges

“…Owing to technical constraints, text reduction or condensation is considered an essential strategy in subtitling (Han, 2019;Suratno & Wijaya, 2018). In order to provide accurate, comprehensible, and viewer-friendly subtitles within the character limit, translators must decide on the most pertinent information to include in the target subtitles and leave out the relatively superfluous, less relevant, or excessively cognition-demanding information.…”