Subtitling in Audiovisual Translation Landscape: Review of Strategies

Abstract

Audiovisual Translation (AVT) has recently become one of the most thriving genres of translation studies, driven by the rapid technological advancements and their impact on media production and distribution. Subtitling, as one of the most recognized types of Audiovisual Translation (AVT), has established a prominent place in the field of translation, primarily due to the rapid growth of media and its impressive accessibility to audiences worldwide, regardless of their native language. Subtitling audiovisual products and the multimodality of texts are complex processes due to the unique nature of verbal and non-verbal components. This complexity creates various difficulties across the three major categories — cultural, linguistic, and technical — for translators working in subtitling. By contributing to the debunking of the myth of subtitling, this study aims to advance the flourishing genre of AVT as a fully fledged discipline with robust theoretical frameworks and practically sound practices by examining its fundamental techniques, strategies, and methods. Therefore, the study adopted a qualitative research methodology to critically analyze the core concepts and theoretical orientations of well-recognized subtitling taxonomies and to identify their contributions to the subtitling industry. The analytical comparison reveals that each taxonomy has a set of strategies that address a particular subtitling constraint. Therefore, translators working in the subtitling industry should have a thorough understanding of each taxonomy to implement it effectively and overcome various complexities and constraints, especially those associated with culturally bound expressions, linguistic nuances, and technical constraints. The study strongly recommends conducting further studies to investigate in depth the potential of these taxonomies to propose a unified taxonomy that would help translators working in the subtitling industry.