Subtitling for Social and Language Minorities

Mercedes Martínez-Lorenzo

doi:10.47476/jat.v3i2.2020.123

Abstract

Speakers of any (minoritised or majority) language sometimes make language mistakes. Bilingual speakers may use a hybrid language, mixing languages within a sentence or even within a word, especially when they are formally similar, as Spanish and Galician are. For minoritised languages, language errors may contribute to a negative perception towards the minoritised language. The Galician public broadcaster Televisión de Galicia (TVG) has received criticism for not being a high-quality language model, permitting the intrusion of language mistakes in its content. From an exclusively linguistic viewpoint, these errors should be corrected in subtitling. Conversely, subtitling guides and target users favour a verbatim rendition of the audio, in which oral language mistakes should not be corrected. Dialectal features, even if they are not considered errors, are non-standard language. This paper aims at answering the question of “to correct or not to correct” oral errors and dialectal features in the case of minoritised languages. It presents the most relevant data from a literature review, and an analysis of subtitling guidelines & standards and of current practices at TVG. These results have yielded an original protocol for the correction or reproduction of oral errors according to speech control, target audience and broadcast genre, the effect of a mistake, and the type of language error (vocabulary vs. grammar).

Highlights

This paper studies the viability of linking the areas of media accessibility (MA), with special emphasis on inclusive subtitling, and the promotion of minoritised or minority languages, when encountering oral language errors and dialectal features in the audio of audiovisual content
While a language may be both described as a minority language and a minoritised language at the same time, these two concepts are often wrongly used as synonyms: minority relates to a lower quantity of speakers of a language with respect to another language within a territory (Council of Europe, 1992); minoritised alludes to lower quality, that is, inferior use and perception (Díaz-Fouces, 2005, p. 96)
The Galician public broadcaster Televisión de Galicia (TVG) has been criticised for not showing the linguistic richness of the different Galician dialects and for letting language errors creep into its content

Summary

Introduction

This paper studies the viability of linking the areas of media accessibility (MA), with special emphasis on inclusive subtitling, and the promotion of minoritised or minority languages, when encountering oral language errors and dialectal features in the audio of audiovisual content. The meaning of “inclusive” fits with the latest advances in accessibility research, education, and had already been pointed out by Neves herself back in 2008 when she started to question the SDH label: If subtitles are well devised for the d/Deaf they will be useful for hearers. They may not be ideal for each person, but they will be “good enough” for most viewers. As per current market practices offering one single set of subtitles, until customisable subtitling becomes the norm, inclusive subtitles seem to better adapt to postlingually deaf and hearing viewers, rather than to the prelingually Deaf (Pereira & Lorenzo, 2005)

Analysis of a Minoritised Language

Analysis of Current Practices and Literature

Errors

Dialectal features

Findings

Conclusions