Obecność polskich filmów w Niemczech w drugiej połowie lat 30. XX w. Odtworzenie zasad tłumaczenia napisowego

Abstract

In the 1930s, when national animosities hampered the free circulation of films, only a few Polish titles were released on German screens. One of them is a Polish production from 1936 with star-studded cast titled His Great Love . Preserved in the Polish archive, a copy with German subtitles served as research material and provided the basis for the analyses presented in this paper. The texts of the German subtitles on the tape were precisely noted, after which the number of characters in each of them was counted. They were transcribed with the original division into individual inscriptions and verses. The initial and final codes of each subtitle were also written down. Owing to this, the display time of each subtitle could be estimated. The data on the number of characters in each verse and the time of its display made it possible to calculate the assumed reading rate. The transcription of the characters’ original statements was obtained from the Polish copy. In this way, a tabular list of texts was created. With such research material, it was possible to (1) determine the technical aspects of subtitling, (2) conduct a quantitative comparative analysis of the initial and target texts, and (3) reconstruct the translation strategies and techniques applied. The research showed that the assumed reading rate at that time was about 10 characters per second, which was extremely convenient for the viewers. As a result of the comparative analysis of the output and target texts, it was found that 37.5-38% of dialogues were omitted, but without much harm to the viewer. The result of the abbreviations found in the target text from the 1930s fits into the 30-40% omission range for contemporary subtitles. The identification and interpretation of the translation techniques used demonstrated that the translator of the film studied resorted to the same techniques that are used by contemporary subtitling translators to obtain a compact target text: partial reduction, condensation, paraphrase, lexical or syntactic simplification, and elimination. What is interesting, they resemble contemporary subtitles more than intertitles used in 1930, i.e. only several years earlier than the subtitles for His Great Love .