It has been a while since I last watched movies with subtitles. I myself needed subtitles in my movies in order to improve my foreign language skills. I would watch movies with English or Spanish soundfiles and use the subtitles to get more out of the movies. Something aditional to practice foreign languages. You know, you get the sound, more and more understand the pronunciation of the foreign language, and the subtitles serve as support for your understanding. That's how I used subtitles as a consumer and that's how many use it. However, there is an audience that actually is in need of subtitles, like people who don't speak the language of the original soundfile at all, and I think those who need subtitles the most are the deaf and hard of hearing. Throughout my studies of translation at the University of Graz I got more and more in touch with the producing side of subtitling. However, I knew very little about the needs of the actual consuming audience since my consumer needs differed from those who use subtitles as a last source,.. as something that is crucial in order to get the gist of audiovisual material (movies, etc.). I then decided to write my bachelor thesis about multimodal translation--that means film translation that takes place not only on the linguistic level/mode but on all other perceivable modes as well (visuals, kinesics, paralinguistics, graphics, you name it). Since it was the major period of the corona virus, I decided to take an entire semester at the university off in order to emphasize on my bachelor thesis. I read dozens of articles about problems of audiovisual translation, especially subtitling, and later worked on an analisis of professionally subtitled stand-up in order to get an idea of the qualities of professional subtitling. Back then I made sure it wasn't some hobo bullshit that I had an eye on. However, the results of my analisis made me realize that subtitling in its conventional structrure lacks certain qualities that I would expect from professional translation: It turned out that conventional subtitling--even in the professional market--neglect translations on the visual and paralinguistic level. I realized that all the subtitles I saw so far where reduced to a pure linguistic translation, that way leaving aside everything else that can be translated. Sure, the majority of subtitles remained useful for my personal needs mentioned above, but they appeared to be material of low quality for consumers who actually need subtitles. I then found a scientific article that even confirmed me in my belief that the conventions of subtitling lack certain qualities. That is why I ventured out for alternative ways of subtitling and found lots of papers and other material about alternative subtitling, especially fansubbing. Fansubbing is something that developed in the Asian market, especially the Japanese manga market. Unskilled translators (in terms of their academic knowledge and their knowledge of foreign languages) there would exploit several subtitling tools that are barely used in conventional subtitling products in order to translate screen and sound elements that wouldn't have been translated otherwise. True, in these amateur translations you would always perceive a considerable deficiency of translation on the linguistic level, but another considerable amount of information translated on other levels of the movie material. Something that really surprised me were simple elements that made the subtitling of fansubs more fruitful than subtitling in its conevntional form: Whereas you would see conventional subtitles merely centered in the bottom or top of a movie screen, you find the content of fansubs placed on varying positions, depending on where the lines are needed. Whereas conventional subtitles would appear primarily in constant white or constant yellow letters, the fansub texts vary in color, depending on who utters something in a movie. Solely those two freedoms of fansubbing made clear to me that I needed to work out an own alternative way of producing subtitles, provided I wanted my needy audience to get the gist of the material I serve. I then downloaded a subtitling program called Aegisub and spend a great deal of time on playing with exactly these tools that would not have been used by the so-called professional subitle translator. And so my journey began...
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