Movie Subtitles Research Articles

Exploring Subtitling Strategies and Pronoun Translation in “Sang Pemimpi” (The Dreamer) Movie Subtitle

The study of pronoun translation in subtitle is crucial to give insight for subtitler for maintaining the producing accurate, respectful, and culturally sensitive translations, ensuring effective communication across different languages and cultures. This research aims to identify pronoun translation in the Indonesian-English movie subtitle of Sang Pemimpi (The Dreamer) movie. This study was designed as qualitative research, with content analysis as a method of collecting the data. The analysis focused on how the pronoun in the subtitle translated from SL to TL, what are the cultural reasons of using pronoun and what are strategies used by the translator with considering grammatical and socio-cultural aspects in both the Source Language (SL) and Target Language (TL). The findings reveal three categories of pronoun translation occur in subtitle, they are pronoun to pronoun, pronoun to reference, and pronoun to omission. A total of 680 pronouns were translated, with 521 (77%) translated as pronoun to pronoun, 152 (22%) as a pronoun to omission, and 7 (1%) as a pronoun to reference. These results underscore the diverse background factors influencing why pronouns are translated, including socio-cultural and grammatical considerations. There are several subtiling strategies used by translators to translate the sentences, including genralization, direct translation, explicitation, and subtiution. These strategiess are employed to ensure fidelity to the original meaning while adapting to linguistic and cultural nuances in the target language.

Countering Gender Stereotypes: The Power of the Main Female Character in Thor: Ragnarok Movie (2017)

Gender stereotypes constructed by society are detrimental for women. Women were seen as weak and underestimated by society (the PEW Research Center’s survey in 2017). This study aims to discover how a film entitled Thor: Ragnarok (2017) countered gender stereotypes through the portrayal of the main female character, Hela, and to reveal the reason behind such portrayal of Hela. This study is a qualitative study because the data are qualitative data. The data of this study are clauses collected from the movie subtitles, containing Hela’s power to counter gender stereotypes. This study applied Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis (three-dimensional framework), supported by Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), which focused on the transitivity system for the first-dimension analysis. After doing the three-dimensional analysis, it is found that Hela’s character in the movie is portrayed as opposing gender stereotypes. Hela is represented as strong, brave, and feared. These traits are against the stereotype of women described as weak, fearful, and underestimated. The reason behind the portrayal of Hela as a strong woman is to promote the feminism spirit to the people in that women should be empowered, in line with the goal of the United Nations (UN) Women and the UN Foundation that protect women's rights and supports women in achieving gender equality.

ENGLISH VOCABULARY RETENTION ON MOVIE SERIES WITH L1 AND ENGLISH SUBTITLES: THE ROLE OF VOCABULARY LEVEL AND FREQUENCY

Regardless of its significance for language learning, the effect of a movie subtitle on vocabulary retention was rarely investigated. This study aimed to compare the impact of the subtitles in the first language (L1, Indonesian) and English as the target language on the learners’ vocabulary retention after watching seven episodes of a movie series. Sixty pre-service English teachers were divided into L1 and English subtitle groups to watch all episodes of the series in three non-consecutive days with a randomly pre-determined subtitle. They completed a vocabulary test before the experiment, immediately after the experiment, and one week after the experiment. The tests comprise words from the 2nd to 11th 1,000 level appearing at least five times across all episodes. The data were analyzed using inferential statistical analysis. The results show that vocabulary improvement was significant in both groups without any differences between groups. Still, the English subtitle group outperformed L1 subtitle counterparts for vocabulary between the 2nd and 9th 1,000 level and vocabulary appearing between five and ten times. These results suggest that movie series with both L1 and English subtitles can be used to expose students to English vocabulary, but a target language subtitle was superior for vocabulary retention. Therefore, English language learners are suggested to watch captioned English movies for maximum impact on vocabulary acquisition.

Areal and phylogenetic dimensions of word order variation in Indo-European languages

Abstract Both areal and phylogenetic affiliation have been discussed as driving factors of the distribution of word order in the languages of the world. However, disentangling the interaction of these two factors is challenging. Here we take Indo-European as a test case. Word order in this family is largely homogeneous both within areas and within branches, which makes it difficult to assess which factor was more important in shaping the present-day distribution. To break out of this impasse we turn to corpus data and explicit statistical modeling. Building on a parallel corpus of movie subtitles, we investigate word order on the sentence level under stable pragmatic conditions. We measure the similarity of word order variation between pairs of languages with an information-theoretic distance metric. Using cluster analysis and variation partitioning methods these distance metrics show that phylogenetic distance predicts more variation than geographical distance, but the most important predictor is the shared fraction where phylogeny and area overlap. We conclude that word order has evolved along both dimensions and cannot be reduced to a single one.

TRANSLATION TECHNIQUES OF RACIAL SLURS IN THE MOVIE '42' SUBTITLES

This research aimed to classify racism slurs translation techniques in the subtitles of the movie entitled 42 made by professional (Netflix) and fan subtitlers (Movieku). It applied a qualitative approach with a case study design. For analyzing the data, it used document analysis with the objects the movie transcripts and subtitles. The data were analyzed by using the theory of translation technique from Molina and Albir (2002). From the total 192 data (96 for each category) there were found 11 types of translation techniques applied, i.e.: amplification, compensation, description, established equivalent, literal translation, linguistic compression, modulation, naturalization borrowing, particularization, pure borrowing, and reduction. The data show that both professional and fansub use more than one type of translation techniques that can be grouped into single (22.4%), duplet (58.8%), triplet (18.2%), and quartet group (0.5%). The frequency of occurrences of each group of the translation techniques in the professional subtitles are 20 times or 20.83% for single, 50 (52.08%) for duplet, 25 (26.04%) for triplet, and only 1 (1.04%) for quartet. In fansubs, there are 23 occurrences or 23.96% for single, 63 (65.62%) for duplet, 10 (10.41%) for triplet, and none for quartet. The result of this research is expected to be a reference for the other research with the same topic.

Assessing Translation of Humor in The English Subtitles of Goodbye Mr. Loser

Humor is primarily influenced by both the source and target language cultures, which poses significant challenges for translators. Given the continuous emergence of comedy movies, humor plays a crucial role in cultural expression. However, research on the assessment of translation quality of humor in movie subtitles in China remains limited. This study aims to categorize the translation techniques using Pedersen’s typology (2005, 2011) and assess the translation quality of the humorous content in the English subtitles of the Chinese comedy movie Goodbye, Mr. Loser (2015). Goodbye, Mr. Loser is one of the most successful comedy movies in China in recent years, selling 1.441 billion yuan at the box office and winning an award at the China New Era International Film Festival, while also gaining a lot of attention overseas. This study analyzes the accuracy of the English subtitles based on Newmark’s (1988) framework. In his model, Newmark (1988) assesses the accuracy by looking at the accurate reflection of the semantic, contextual, register and style of the ST in TT. Additionally, it adopts a questionnaire for non-Chinese speakers following Nababan, Nuraeni and Sumardiono’s (2012) approach to assess the acceptability and readability of the English subtitles. The significance of this study lies in its potential to enhance the quality of Chinese audiovisual products, reduce language barriers, foster effective cross-culture communication, and provide a valuable reference for the humor translation in Chinese comedy movies in the future.

Pragmatic Failures in Movie Subtitles: The Case of Kurdish Subtitles of Treasure Island

Pragmatic failures are critical in movie translation as they affect the message of the movie. Pragmatic failure refers to the mismatches that may occur between speakers’ intended meaning and translators’ constructed meaning. The paper aims to investigate the nature of pragmatic failures in translating movie subtitles from English into Kurdish. It attempts to identify the factors that cause pragmatic failures and find out the types of failures in the selected movie. The data of the study are taken from the transcripts of the English adventure movie Treasure Island which has been translated into Kurdish. The English source text and the Kurdish subtitles were compared to find out the types and identify the causes of pragmatic failures. The paper draws upon Thomas’s (1983) category to classify pragmatic failures. The results of the study show that both types of pragmalinguistic failure and sociopragmatic failure are found in the movie which resulted from a lack of translator’s qualification in translation, a lack of pragmatic as well as cultural knowledge of both the source and target languages. It has also been found that pragmatic failures are failures of transferring speech acts from the source language to the target language that cause a lack of proper understanding of the source message. In other words, pragmatic failures are the result of mistranslation, under-translation, and over-translation errors which cause non-equivalency between the message in the source language and the one in the target language.

Introduction of Machine Translation into Audiovisual Translation Teaching

Subtitling has long been the primary type of audiovisual translation in Slovenia. A steady increase in the production of audiovisual content, including English-speaking movies and TV series, along with the development of machine translation, have seen a growing need and opportunity for subtitling globally. The Department of Translation Studies (University of Ljubljana) has offered courses in subtitling to MA students for over twenty years. In the course of this time, teaching methods have been adapted to embrace new technologies. Recently, students have shown interest in incorporating machine translation into the subtitling course. The paper presents an analysis of a subtitling assignment in which students were asked to post-edit DeepL’s Slovene translation of English formatted movie subtitles. The post-edited subtitles were compared with the subtitles done by a group of students from scratch. The results show considerable differences in the students’ multimodal awareness and the overall quality of the subtitles between the two groups.

An analysis of translation techniques for racist utterances in Rush Hour 3

This study aims to analyse the translation of racist content in the movie subtitles of "Rush Hour 3" by Dhespy fansub (Movieku) and Putra fansub (Lk21). The research uses a qualitative method and a case study design. Document analysis, including transcripts and subtitles, was employed in this research. The data were analysed by using the theory from Molina and Albir (2002). The result shows that 86 data were taken from the 2 fansub translators (43 data for each). Based on findings, there are 14 types of translation techniques are used, namely; Adaptation, Amplification, Borrowing, Calque, Compensation, Description, Establish Equivalent, Generalization, Linguistic Amplification, Linguistic Compression, Literal Translation, Modulation, Particularization, and Reduction. The researchers found that both fansubs used multiple translation techniques, with single (38%), duplet (40%), triplet (20%), and quartet groups (2%). In the Dhespy group, single grouping occurred 16 times (37%), duplet 15 times (35%), triplet 10 times (23%), and quartet 2 times (5%). In the fansub group, single grouping occurred 17 times (40%), duplet 19 times (44%), triplet 7 times (16%), and quartet none. The researchers hope this research can be helpful as a reference for readers who want to add knowledge about language features to their study. Keywords: Movie; Racism; Translation Technique; Translator

Subtitle Analysis of A Swing Maker under Multimodal Discourse Analysis

Nowadays, movies have gradually become one of the main ways of global cultural communication, and movie subtitle translation has also become an important factor for foreign audiences to better understand the content of the movie, therefore, the study of movie subtitle translation is urgent. With the increasingly deepening of China’s foreign exchanges, Chinese movies, as a carrier of Chinese culture, have gradually come into the international field of vision as an important way of spreading Chinese culture and promoting cultural exchanges. Therefore, the study of movie subtitle translation has become one of the main ways to better tell Chinese stories. Different from traditional translation, movie subtitle translation needs to take more factors into consideration, including movie images, speaker’s character traits, and the influence of movie layout, etc. Therefore, this paper uses multimodal discourse analysis to analyze the subtitles of A Swing Maker in order to analyze the influence of movie images, movie plots, and character traits on subtitle translation. A Swing Maker mainly tells the story of Chinese oilmen, through the subtitle translation analysis of the movie, it is more conducive to the dissemination of the spirit of Chinese oil story to other countries, telling the story of Chinese oil well, and contributing to the dissemination of the story of Chinese oil.

A quantitative analysis of racist epithets referring to Italians and their translations in movie subtitles: The case of wop, eyetie and goombah

A quantitative analysis of racist epithets referring to Italians and their translations in movie subtitles: The case of wop, eyetie and goombah

A corpus-based study of translating idioms from English into Arabic using audio-visual translation

PurposeAudio-visual translation (AVT) is recognized as the most vibrant type of translation. While AVT plays a vital function in the field of translation, its significance within cultural studies hasn’t been thoroughly investigated. This research aims to uncover the predominant techniques employed in translating idiomatic expressions found in subtitled movies from English to Arabic.Design/methodology/approachThe corpus utilized in the current study consisted of five movies. The dialog in the chosen English films was examined to identify idiomatic expressions. The occurrence and proportion of each approach employed in translating English idioms into Arabic were calculated.FindingsThe findings of this investigation unveiled that the most common technique employed by translators to render idioms was retaining both similar meaning and similar form. The second approach involved maintaining a similar meaning while altering the form. The third method involved paraphrasing for translation. The fourth strategy was compensation-based translation. When dealing with verb and object idioms as well as similes, the predominant techniques were retaining both similar meaning and similar form, followed by a similar meaning but different form approach. Compound idioms were translated using paraphrasing, similar meaning but different form and similar meaning but different form strategies.Originality/valueThe research was constrained to examining the utilization of subtitles for the translation of five films. The films and corresponding Arabic subtitles were obtained and saved in plain text formats. Solely idiomatic expressions were scrutinized to determine the translation approaches employed through the use of subtitles.

TRANSLATION SHIFTS IN THE INDONESIAN SUBTITLE OF GUY RITCHIE’S THE COVENANT (2023) MOVIE

Translation is important for people who don't know a foreign language. Translators face challenges, but use of techniques like translation shifts can make translations sound more natural and effectively communicate the original meaning to the target audience. This research aims to identify the types of translation shifts used in the Indonesian subtitle of Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant movie and to identify the possible reasons the translators used translation shifts in this movie. The research applied the theory of translation shift proposed by Catford to analyze the data. It used descriptive qualitative methods and the data is from the movie subtitle of Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant. The researcher used the Oxford Dictionary and Big Indonesian Dictionary (KBBI) applications as instruments for analyzing the data, and to ensure the analysis results. The analysis found that the Indonesian subtitles for Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant movie included all types of shifts as proposed by Catford's theory. The shifts identified in the Indonesian subtitles included level shifts and category shifts (including structure shift, unit shift, class shift, and intra-system shift). However, among these shifts, category shifts especially unit shifts, were the most dominant. The translator probably used these translation shifts due to cultural and linguistic differences, time constraints, and creative translation choices.

Preservation of sentiment in machine translation of low-resource languages: a case study on Slovak movie subtitles

AbstractThis research explores the effectiveness of machine translation from Slovak to English for sentiment analysis, specifically focusing on the translation of movie subtitles. The study employs a parallel corpus of segmented movie subtitles in both languages and utilizes IBM Watson™ Natural Language Understanding service and Google Translate. The research aims to assess the correlation between human-generated text and machine-translated text in sentiment analysis. A comparative analysis was also conducted using OpenAI to evaluate the sentiment of the Slovak text directly, without translation into English. The findings reveal a strong correlation between human text and machine translation, with a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.86, and a correlation with OpenAI’s GPT model evaluation at 0.72. Despite the relatively high accuracy of the end-to-end solution using OpenAI, the methodology comprising machine translation followed by sentiment analysis in English was found to be significantly more precise. The research further investigates the challenges in translating specific language nuances, such as humor and vulgarism, and their impact on sentiment analysis. The study concludes that machine translation can be effectively used for sentiment analysis in Slovak, a flective language, and highlights the potential of advanced language models in low-resource languages. Future research directions include expanding the study to other text types and comparable languages beyond Slovak.

The Effect of English Subtitle in Movies to Improve Students’ Vocabulary in Grade 8 of SMPN 2 Airmadidi

In today's interconnected world, being skilled in English is incredibly important. It opens up better job opportunities, and wider educational options, and allows participation in the global community. Therefore, inspiring students to learn English is crucial to showing them how it relates to their everyday lives. This study aims to determine the effect of English subtitles of movies on the vocabulary development of 8th-grade students in SMP Negeri 2 Airmadidi. This study adopted a preliminary experiment method. Thirty-two students participated in this targeted study. Subtitled films served as a medium to improve students' vocabulary acquisition, and vocabulary tests served as research tools. Researchers collected data through pretests, treatments, and posttests. Data were statistically analyzed and quantitatively described using SPSS 22 Edition. This study found that the mean post-test score was higher than the pre-test score (5.69 < 8.43). Also, the value of t-count is greater than the value of t-table. The results of students' scores on the post-test were higher than those on the comparison test, demonstrating the effectiveness of the treatment in improving learners' vocabulary acquisition. In summary, the use of subtitled films significantly improves students' vocabulary acquisition. This study strongly highlights that others are imaginatively exploring the use of film for a variety of abilities.

Out-of-School Exposure to English in EFL Teenage Learners: Is It Related to Academic Performance?

Learning a Foreign Language (FL) beyond the classroom has become common practice thanks to advances in technology and the use of English as a Lingua Franca. This study explores the types and amount of out-of-school informal exposure to English that Spanish secondary school students typically receive in their daily lives. Informed by recent literature on the influence of extramural activities on FL proficiency, the second aim of this study is to investigate the potential relationship between out-of-school exposure and academic performance, as measured by English school grades. Data were obtained from a questionnaire answered by secondary school students aged 12–16 (N = 2015) regarding the different types and amounts of activities they perform in English outside school. Findings revealed that teenage learners were most frequently exposed to English through audiovisual input. Social media interaction, along with reading and writing (with or without digital support), were closely associated with their English marks. Other popular activities, such as listening to music or playing video games, were not found to be related to proficiency or even showed a negative correlation with it, while less popular activities, such as watching subtitled movies and series, could have greater potential for language learning. This study contributes to the understanding of informal practices in FL learning settings and provides insights that can help bridge interactive language practices and formal curriculum to create holistic learning experiences for language learners.

A Contrastive Corpus-based Study of American and English Adjectives: ‘Important’ and ‘Significant’

This contrastive corpus-based study aims to analyze the similarities and differences of two synonyms “important” and “significant” concerning on the degree of formality in their distribution across genres as well as their collocations and semantic preference. The corpus data derived from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the British National Corpus (BNC) which represent varieties of English usage across different cultures (American and British). This study analyzed the top 20 noun collocates with Mutual Information (MI) scores value of at least three. The corpus data from COCA and BNC explored some shared characteristics and contrastive features. The findings discovered that the two adjectives have the same core meaning and degree of formality since their highest frequency in academic texts whereas frequencies are the lowest in informal genres i.e. TV and movie subtitles and fiction. In certain conditions, these synonyms are different in terms of noun collocation due to the fact that these synonyms co-occur with particular noun collocates. Interestingly, the findings also confirm two adjectives are near synonyms as they share only two similar theme of semantic preference. In consequence, the two synonyms cannot be used interchangeably in all contexts. Moreover, it was found that the corpora provide some useful details that are deficient in the dictionary.

An Analysis of Translation Techniques of Interrogative Sentence in Maleficent Mistress of Evil 2019 Movie Subtitle

An Analysis of Translation Techniques of Interrogative Sentence in Maleficent Mistress of Evil 2019 Movie Subtitle

Translation Analysis of Interrogative Sentences in “The Terminal” Movie Subtitle

This study is qualitative descriptive research. The purpose of this research is to know kind of interrogative sentences and translation techniques impact to the translation quality in The Terminal movie subtitle. The source of data is the film transcript of The Terminal movie and its subtitle in Indonesian, and the information collected from rater. The technique of data collection was watching the movie, reading the script, and marking the interrogative sentences. In analyzing data, the researcher used the qualitative data analysis which covers domain analysis, taxonomic analysis, and componential analysis. Had been found 114 data, yes-no question (57,97%), wh-question (41,19%), and alternative question (0,87%), 2) the translation technique could be found in The Terminal movie, such as established equivalent (72,08%), variation (15,83%), pure borrowing (3,12%), modulation (2,91%), implicit (1,87%), paraphrase (1,25%), explicit (1,04%), reduction (0,83%), transposition (0,62%), generalization (0,20%), and substitution (0,20%). The impact of the application of those translation techniques, toward the translation quality is the overall quality score 2,98 with the average score of accuracy 2,97, acceptability 2,99, and readability 2,99. Keywords: Translation, Interrogative Sentences, Qualitative Descriptive, The Terminal

THE TRANSLATION OF TABOO UTTERANCES IN FIFTY SHADE OF GREY MOVIE SUBTITLE

The purpose of this research is to find out analysis translation about taboo words in the movie. Taboo words is word or group of wourds that contain ambiguous or exactly inappropriate meaning. Taboo word may be not used or heard for under age. Furthermore, Taboo words might be very dangerous and inappropriate in our country, Indonesia. Whilst there are almost every western movie contains the taboo words. Maybe the purpose is to adjust with the plot or the theme of the story and to adapt with their culture or to make the movies looks natural. The movie transcript and subtitle that used is ‘Fifthy Shades of Grey”, because this movie is about a man named Grey who have a sadistic in sex, so that obviously, this movie contains so many taboo words. In this research, the methods that it used is observation and analysis of the transcript from English (SL) into Indonesia (TL), especially non-participant observation methods. Taboo words is devided into 10 types and it would be explained and there are some examples for each type. Overall, the purpose of this study is to analyse the types of taboo words and to find out how taboo words are translated from SL to TL.