A Relevance-Theoretic Approach to Decision-Making in Subtitling [1st ed.] 9783030518028, 9783030518035

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A Relevance-Theoretic Approach to DecisionMaking in Subtitling

Łukasz Bogucki

A Relevance-Theoretic Approach to Decision-Making in Subtitling

Łukasz Bogucki

A Relevance-Theoretic Approach to Decision-Making in Subtitling

Łukasz Bogucki Institute of English Studies University of Łód´z Lodz, Łódzkie, Poland

ISBN 978-3-030-51802-8 ISBN 978-3-030-51803-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51803-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © John Rawsterne/patternhead.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 6

1

Introduction References

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Relevance in Secondary Communication 1 The Importance of Being Relevant 2 Understanding Relevance Theory 3 Translation and Relevance 4 Assessing Translation Quality 5 Relevance Theory as the Translation Theory References

9 9 11 13 15 17 18

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The Nature of Subtitling 1 From Intertitles to Machine Translation and Beyond—Rendering Film in Writing 2 Intersemiotic Translation in Context 3 Norms, Guidelines and Standards 4 Processing Effort References

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Towards a Relevance-Theoretic Model of Decision-Making in Subtitling 1 Introduction—The Original Model 2 Assessment—Towards a New Model

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35 35 37 v

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CONTENTS

3 Relevant Subtitling 4 Contextualisation of Film 5 Relevance, Film Translation and Processing Effort 6 The New Model References

38 41 45 47 49

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Application of the Model 1 Introductory Remarks 2 The Visual and the Verbal 3 Culture-Specificity 4 Wordplay 5 Intertextuality 6 Inflectionality 7 Multilinguality 8 Paratextual Consistency 9 Language Variety 10 Forms of Address 11 Condensation 12 Anachronisms 13 Redundancy 14 Technical Inaccuracy 15 Irrelevance References

53 53 57 60 64 68 72 77 79 80 83 85 86 87 89 89 90

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Conclusion References

93 96

Bibliography Index

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List of Figures

Fig. 1 Fig. 2

A model of constraints on subtitling (Bogucki 2004: 86) The proposed model of relevance-driven decision-making in subtitling

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract This introductory section discusses the current state of research on audiovisual translation both within and outside the framework of translation studies. Earlier approaches to Relevance Theory in translation are briefly mentioned. Finally, research assumptions and hypotheses are laid out. Keywords Audiovisual translation (AVT) · Relevance theory · Decision-making

If one takes any publication on audiovisual translation (AVT) written in the early twenty-first century (e.g. Díaz-Cintas 2001), its introduction will almost inevitably highlight the dynamic nature and rapid development of AVT. However, recent works seem to take this dynamism for granted (cf. e.g. Bogucki and Deckert 2020). This does not mean that the development of AVT has ceased, though—on the contrary; these days, it is seen as an inevitable concomitant to research in this area. The four driving forces behind the constant advances in AVT practice (and, by extension, research) can be summed up by the interrogative pronouns—how, what, why and for whom.

© The Author(s) 2020 Ł. Bogucki, A Relevance-Theoretic Approach to Decision-Making in Subtitling, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51803-5_1

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Firstly, the omnipresent technological headway directly impacts the creation of different language versions of audiovisual products. New techniques appear (such as interlingual live subtitling, cf. Romero-Fresco and Pöchhacker 2017), while established ones, like cinema subtitling, become far more machine-assisted and, consequently, far less humanmade. Machine translation is par for the course and software packages grow ever more sophisticated. Research into AVT deploys experimental methods, e.g. electroencephalography and psychophysiological measures such as galvanic skin response and heart rate (Orero et al. 2018: 114; see also Matamala et al. 2020), while previously novel methodological approaches, such as the use of eye tracking, become common and widely deployed. AVT research is escaping the confines of (linguistic) translation studies,1 paving the way for a new (inter)discipline (cf. Bogucki 2019). Secondly, the audiovisual products of today tend to carry more information (verbal or otherwise), become increasingly interactive (e.g. Netflix’s Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, in which the audience can decide how the plot develops) and interconnected (sequels, prequels, remakes, reboots, spinoffs, even interquels or midquels). This takes the practice of AVT to a whole new level. On the one hand, software development almost makes the traditional technical (space and time) constraints on subtitling (see e.g. Bogucki 2004) obsolete. On the other hand, the subtitler must be ready to cope with a much higher pace of action and shorter scenes (see Chapter 3), as well as information overload (increased use of text on screen); this may increase the audience’s cognitive effort (cf. Chapter 4, Sect. 5). Intertextual relations between episodes within a series, a related series, a feature film that the series is based on (e.g. Fargo the movie vs. Fargo the series or Bates Motel vs. Psycho), or film adaptations of literature call for consistency in translation. If a movie and its trailer are translated by two different translators without recourse to one another, the clash in style and lexis can immediately be noticed (cf. Chapter 5, Sect. 8). All of the above, combined with the emergence of new genres and refinement of familiar ones, calls for extensive research into the nature of the audiovisual text.

1 Throughout this work, “translation studies” refers to the academic interdiscipline dealing with translation, while “Descriptive Translation Studies” (capitalised) refers to a particular approach within translation studies (see Chapter 3).

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Thirdly, assuming that media accessibility is seen as a subset of AVT (see Greco 2018 for a discussion), audiovisual products are not only translated interlingually, that is to say in order to provide different language versions for wider dissemination, but also intralingually, whether for the sake of social inclusion to cope with sensory impairment, or for legal reasons (accessibility in the EU is regulated by the Audiovisual Media Services Directive2 ). Digital TV gives audiences the power to make choices with the help of a remote controller, so more AVT modalities can be used for the same programme. The fourth driving force behind the development of AVT is the target audience. Audiences with various degrees of disabilities such as sight or hearing loss require completely different approaches depending on the presence, type and degree of disability. The former two are not the subject of the present book, but the audience profile in the case of interlingual AVT is undergoing constant changes, as evidenced by reception studies (Bogucki and Deckert 2018). In the past, the audience tended to consume audiovisual entertainment in a cinema or at home in front of a TV set. While the two media are still in operation, their structure has changed due to the digital revolution and they are inevitably pushed to the background by a far more expedient, versatile and flexible medium— online streaming. Today, audiovisual content can be accessed not only via computer screens, but also smartphones, which opens the market wide, but may result in previously irrelevant technical constraints (e.g. the visibility of subtitles on a four-inch screen). English has been a lingua franca for decades, if not centuries, but globalisation and schooling have elevated it to a level where young people (the default audience for online streaming) take it for granted. Subtitlers are now discouraged from translating out of English in cases where translation is not a prerequisite for comprehension. For instance, in a scene where a car pulls up, bearing flashing lights and the inscription SHERIFF or POLICE on the door, translating the inscription is redundant; the audience will understand the communicative intention (law enforcement has arrived) and the lack of a subtitle will help them concentrate on other elements of the polysemiotic audiovisual message. This short monograph aims to investigate the process of decisionmaking in subtitling. For the sake of research homogeneity, it omits 2 https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/audiovisual-media-services-directiveavmsd, accessed on February 24, 2020.

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discussion of other modalities of AVT, concentrating on the one which may have the most potential to become the default mode of interlingual film translation, at the same time providing the optimal surroundings to illustrate the research hypothesis. The corpus of examples is made up of Polish subtitles to feature films, entertainment series, documentaries and other audiovisual material available on the streaming platform Netflix. The technical, linguistic and translational constraints at work in subtitling result in a curtailed target text. The restrictions on the form and content also stem from the additive nature of subtitling; the target audience receive the complete filmic message plus added text, which increases their cognitive effort, therefore optimum subtitles are ones which are inconspicuous and easy to process. On the other hand, subtitles must render not just the dialogue in isolation, but its content in conjunction with the information load of the three other semiotic channels, viz. picture, soundtrack and text on the screen. The study of constraints on the process of decision-making in interlingual subtitling is done within the cognitive framework of Relevance Theory (RT, Sperber and Wilson 1986). While there is currently no shortage of academic publications on subtitling in English and other languages,3 the linguistic and translational scope of this work combines the best of both worlds. Relevance Theory continues to be an influential approach to communication, but its application to secondary communication (=translation) is surprisingly wanting or outright rejected (cf. Sapire 1996). For instance, translation is conspicuous by its absence from an influential volume published towards the end of the twentieth century and titled Current Issues in Relevance Theory (Rouchota and Jucker 1998). Far more criticism has been levelled at the application of RT to translation by E. A. Gutt than at RT itself: “[s]ince the publication of his landmark book, Translation and relevance: cognition and context (1991), Gutt has become one of the most controversial and most misunderstood modern translation theorists” (Smith 2002: 107). Not only does the current work attempt to bridge the divide between translation theory and practice, but also to fill in another glaring gap. Research on subtitling is veering towards experimental studies (eye tracking), while seminal linguistic approaches (e.g. Skopos theory, Vermeer 1978) are becoming 3 According to the online bibliography of interpreting and translation, as of February 24, 2020, there were 1680 publications on subtitling (https://aplicacionesua.cpd.ua.es/ tra_int/usu/buscar.asp?idioma=en).

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outdated or even obliterated; thus, there is need for a fresh look at subtitling from a language perspective. The present work revisits a seminal approach, giving it a new lease of life and positioning it on the current scene of AVT. This is in stark contrast to other linguistic approaches to subtitling, which may no longer be relevant due to the dramatic changes to the practice of AVT in recent years. There seem to be two reasons for the limited popularity of linguistic approaches to translation of late. Firstly, translation is increasingly machine-dependent and intersemiotic, therefore, translation research draws from disciplines other than traditional linguistics, exploring topics such as neural networks and visual communication. Secondly, translation studies as an independent academic discipline is emerging, though its road to independence has been a long and winding one (cf. e.g. Bogucki 2017). The new discipline is developing its own research methods, not necessarily identical with those used in linguistics. Moreover, practitioners often find theories hermetic, impractical or simply unfamiliar. It is argued here that the application of Relevance Theory to subtitling does not suffer from the shortcomings listed above. RT is an approach that is just as rooted in linguistics as it is rooted in pragmatics and communication studies. Its assumptions are universal. Research done within the framework of RT can deploy a range of methods, including experimental ones. Most importantly, the basic premise of Relevance Theory requires no theoretical background as such and can be approached from a purely practical perspective. The present work aims at characterising and exemplifying the process of decision-making in subtitling for online streaming. The research hypothesis is that subtitlers make decisions in line with the principle(s) of relevance. At the risk of oversimplification, subtitling is about deciding how to make the target audience enjoy a translated movie as much as the source audience enjoyed the original. This goal can only be accomplished if the processing effort of subtitle consumption is brought to a minimum. However, this is not a simple linear proportion of less information and fewer words equalling less cognitive effort and, therefore, better subtitling. Insufficient information in subtitles leaves the audience puzzled as to what the given scene means and, therefore, puts them to increased cognitive effort. This was recognised by Irena Kovaˇciˇc in the first work on the application to RT to subtitling: “[o]n the one hand, the target audience is spared the effort of processing the missing part, but, on the other hand, they may find it more difficult to process the remaining part”

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(Kovaˇciˇc 1993: 250). Thus, the key to demarcating the fine line between excessive and inadequate information is the focus of the present volume, viz. relevance.

References Bogucki, Łukasz. 2004. A Relevance Framework for Constraints on Cinema Subtitling. Łód´z: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego. Bogucki, Łukasz. 2017. The Terminological Conundrum of Translation Studies. Toward a Polish Dictionary of Translation Terms. Zagadnienia Rodzajów Literackich (The Problems of Literary Genres) 60 (3): 27–36. Bogucki, Łukasz. 2019. Areas and Methods of Audiovisual Translation Research, 3rd ed. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Bogucki, Łukasz, and Mikołaj Deckert. 2018. Badanie preferencji dotycz˛acych przekładu audiowizualnego w´sród polskich widzów. In Mi˛edzy tekstem a kultura. ˛ Z zagadnien´ przekładoznawstwa, ed. Piotr Chruszczewski and Aleksandra Knapik, 252–267. AE Academic Publishing. Bogucki, Łukasz, and Mikołaj Deckert (eds.). 2020. The Palgrave Handbook of Audiovisual Translation and Media Accessibility. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Díaz-Cintas, Jorge. 2001. La traducción audiovisual. El subtitulado. Salamanca: Almar. Greco, Gian-Maria. 2018. The Nature of Accessibility Studies. Journal of Audiovisual Translation 1: 205–232. Gutt, Ernst-August. 1991. Translation and Relevance: Cognition and Context. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Kovaˇciˇc, Irena. 1993. Relevance as a Factor in Subtitling Reduction. In Teaching Translation and Interpretation 2: Insights, Aims, Visions, ed. Cay Dollerup and Anne Lindegaard, 245–251. John Benjamins: Amsterdam and Philadelphia. Matamala, Anna, Olga Soler-Vilageliu, Gonzalo Iturregui-Gallardo, Anna Jankowska, Jorge-Luis Méndez-Ulrich, and Anna Serrano Ratera. 2020. Electrodermal Activity as a Measure of Emotions in Media Accessibility Research: Methodological Considerations. The Journal of Specialised Translation 33: 129–151. Orero, Pilar, Stephen Doherty, Jan-Louis Kruger, Anna Matamala, Jan Pedersen, Elisa Perego, Pablo Romero-Fresco, Sara Rovira-Esteva, Olga Soler-Vilageliu, and Agnieszka Szarkowska. 2018. Conducting Experimental Research in Audiovisual Translation (AVT): A Position Paper. The Journal of Specialised Translation 30: 105–126. Romero-Fresco, Pablo, and Franz Pöchhacker. 2017. Quality Assessment in Interlingual Live Subtitling: The NTR Model. Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series: Themes in Translation Studies 16: 149–167.

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Rouchota, Villy, and Andreas H. Jucker (eds.). 1998. Current Issues in Relevance Theory. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Sapire, Johanna Elizabeth. 1996. Gutt’s Relevance-Theoretic Account of Translation: An Account of ‘Translation’ or, Non-Translation? South African Journal of Linguistics 14 (1): 1–7. Smith, Kevin. 2002. Translation as Secondary Communication. The Relevance Theory Perspective of Ernst-August Gutt. Acta Theologica Supplementum 2: 107–117. Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson. 1986. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. Vermeer, Hans Josef. 1978. Ein Rahmen für eine allgemeine Translationstheorie. Lebende Sprachen 23 (3): 99–102.

CHAPTER 2

Relevance in Secondary Communication

Abstract This chapter sets out the foundations of Sperber and Wilson’s influential theory and its role in understanding communication from a linguistic perspective. Furthermore, it provides a critical study of recent approaches to Relevance Theory from a linguistic and communicative angle. Finally, it makes a few general observations on pertinent issues in translation studies and goes on to embark on RT’s potential in understanding secondary communication (translation). An assessment of the bold claim made by some theoreticians (e.g. E. A. Gutt) that Relevance Theory can act in lieu of translation theory is also made. Keywords Relevance theory · Secondary communication · Translation theory

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The Importance of Being Relevant

Before we embark on a scrutiny of Relevance Theory (RT) as a cognitive approach to linguistic communication, let us focus on the concept of relevance (in language) itself. Arguably the simplest accurate definition of relevance is “a trade-off between effort and effects” (Allott 2013: 57). Relevant communication is that which permits the achievement of intended effects without expending unnecessary effort. In other words, © The Author(s) 2020 Ł. Bogucki, A Relevance-Theoretic Approach to Decision-Making in Subtitling, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51803-5_2

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“an input [to a cognitive system] is more relevant the more cognitive effects it yields, and less relevant the more mental effort it takes to process” (Allott 2013: 59). As a result of constant selection pressures, the human cognitive system has developed a variety of dedicated (innate or acquired) mental mechanisms or biases which tend to allocate attention to inputs with the greatest expected relevance, and process them in the most relevance-enhancing way (Wilson 2009: 394). This observation, which is also the main tenet of RT, is indeed one that has driven not just human communication, but human activity in general: to achieve the optimal result while investing minimal effort. Translation studies scholars are familiar with another seminal approach that comes down to the same logic and at the same time could be seen as groundwork for the application of RT to translation. As early as 1967, when translation studies was in its infancy, the Czech translation theoretician Jiˇrí Levý famously remarked that “actual translation work […] is pragmatic; the translator resolves for that one of the possible solutions which promises a maximum of effect with a minimum of effort” (Levý 1967/2000: 156). The Minimax strategy, as he called this principle, would certainly benefit from being tried and tested by introspective cognitive research, for instance Think Aloud Protocols, but as a tenet it remains valid to this day, although the “actual translation work” of today differs considerably from that practised half a century ago (note for instance Pedersen’s application of Minimax to subtitling [2011: 78]). Incidentally, Levý’s influential paper discusses translation as a decision-making process, a series of steps whereby the translator chooses from among available alternatives, guided by instructions (comparable to what Toury [1995] later referred to as norms), with each choice pre-determining subsequent decisions. Three decades later, Wilss (1994: 131) saw decision-making in terms of interactions between the various elements of the translator’s cognitive system, viz. linguistic, referential, socio-cultural and situational knowledge bases. This shift from a normative to a cognitive perspective on decision-making in translation is symptomatic of the developments in disciplines related to translation studies, mainly linguistics. The locus classicus for anyone intending to read on Relevance Theory is undoubtedly Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson’s seminal monograph (Sperber and Wilson 1986), but the concept of relevance in linguistic pragmatics was neither originated nor exhausted, certainly, there and then. It is widely accepted that Relevance Theory grew out of the philosopher Herbert Paul Grice’s influential contribution to linguistics, the

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Cooperative Principle (Grice 1975). One of the four elements (maxims) of the Cooperative Principle, the Maxim of Relevance (also known as the Maxim of Relation), is ostensibly a case of ignotum per ignotum; the maxim simply sounds “be relevant”. However, Grice does provide an explanation: “I expect a partner’s contribution to be appropriate to immediate needs at each stage of the transaction” (Grice 1975: 47). In his later work, Grice had this to say about the extremely succinct wording of the maxim: “Though the maxim itself is terse, its formulation conceals a number of problems that exercise me a good deal: questions about what different kinds and focuses of relevance there may be, how these shift in the course of a talk exchange, how to allow for the fact that subjects of conversations are legitimately changed, and so on. I find the treatment of such questions exceedingly difficult, and I hope to revert to them in later work” (Grice 1989: 27). His wish was certainly granted, albeit not so much by himself, but by a number of followers—neo-Gricean (e.g. Levinson 2000; Horn 2005) and post-Gricean, in particular relevance theorists. Essentially, RT rejects the Cooperative Principle, focusing instead on the principle of relevance (Sperber and Wilson 1986), later postulated as two hypotheses: the cognitive principle (“human cognition tends to be geared to the maximisation of relevance”), and the narrower, communicative principle (“every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance”) (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 158; see also Van Der Henst and Sperber 2004). The principle(s) will serve us as a viable starting point to introduce Relevance Theory.

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Understanding Relevance Theory

With respect to the principle(s) quoted above, the founders of Relevance Theory are very clear about their status: “[c]ommunicators and audience need no more know the principle of relevance to communicate than they need to know the principles of genetics to reproduce. Communicators do not ‘follow’ the principle of relevance; and they could not violate it even if they wanted to. The principle of relevance applies without exception” (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 162). This is a pertinent observation from the viewpoint of the present work. In the later sections, it is demonstrated how audiovisual translators follow the general principle of relevance not as scholars familiar with Relevance Theory, but as practitioners who merely use their expertise and common sense to deliver solutions that naturally follow the logic of relevance. The practicality of Relevance Theory is its

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main asset. Its popularity and universality undoubtedly lie in the simplicity and naturalness of its core logic. Stripped of its linguistic jargon and maximally simplified, at the cellular level, Relevance Theory postulates that we only do what is necessary or be rewarded whenever doing more than necessary, achieving as much as possible at the lowest cost possible. It asks and answers relevant questions (pun not intended) concerning human communication and the interpretation thereof. While the statement that the principle of relevance applies without exception and cannot, by definition, be violated is very clear, a disclaimer must be made at this point. Grice’s Cooperative Principle has been found to be occasionally flouted in communication (cf. Ayasreh and Razali 2018; Brumark 2006). By a similar logic, the principle of relevance, though universally applicable, may in certain situations be bent or flouted, whereby the processing effort is increased, yet the extra benefits that usually accompany the increase are not observable. Some examples of such situations in subtitling are presented in Sect. 15 of Chapter 5. Relevance Theory sits at the crossroads of linguistics, communication studies, pragmatics and—as will be demonstrated in this work—translation studies, having had a significant influence on all these disciplines. In his overview of the current status of RT thirty years after its conception, Padilla Cruz notes that: “[r]elevance theorists’ continuous challenging of often-taken-for-granted assumptions, claims, generalisations, and even whole models, has also brought fresher air to those disciplines. Indeed, they have analysed in depth a wide variety of linguistic and communicative phenomena from a different perspective and with a new theoretical apparatus, which has shed much light onto underexplored or overlooked issues” (Padilla Cruz 2016: 1). RT focuses on a particular type of human activity and the stimuli generated as a result thereof, viz. communication and utterances. These are analysed from the point of view of: (i) the positive cognitive effects (the improvements to the mental representation of the world around us) and (ii) the (processing of) cognitive effort required to comprehend information. Thus, optimal relevance takes place if: (i) an utterance is relevant enough for the receiver to invest the necessary amount of processing effort and (ii) it will result in positive cognitive effects, in line with the receiver’s processing ability (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 270). To simplify, an exchange of information can be likened to a contract, whereby the receiver goes to the trouble of processing the speaker’s communicative stimulus (message), hoping in return for a reward in the form of positive

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cognitive effects; vice versa, the speaker will intend to produce communicative stimuli that will provide these effects at the lowest possible cost, that is to say, with no unnecessary processing effort (cf. Wilson and Sperber 2002). Gutt (1989: 76) refers to relevance as “a cost-benefit relation”. This contract hinges on its subject (the communicative exchange) having two important qualities, viz. ostensive and inferential. The former indicates the speaker’s purposefulness in getting the receiver’s attention, the latter refers to the receiver having to decipher the speaker’s meaning. Sperber and Wilson explain that “[u]tterance comprehension is seen as essentially an exercise in mind-reading, and the challenge for relevance theorists attempting to build a psychologically plausible, empirically testable pragmatic theory is precisely to explain how the closed formal system of language provides effective pieces of evidence which, combined with contextual information, enable successful comprehension to take place” (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 122). Relevance Theory posits that the speaker, engaging in intentional communication with the receiver, is motivated by two intentions, viz. informative and communicative. Thus communication hinges on the speaker making manifest his or her assumptions and the audience recognising the speaker’s informative intention. Sperber and Wilson explain that “a fact is manifest to an individual at a given time if and only if he is capable at that time of representing it mentally and accepting its representation as true or probably true” (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 39). The facts manifest to an individual constitute their cognitive environment (ibidem). Manifestness is a very versatile concept that eschews the drawbacks of notions like common or mutual knowledge (Padilla Cruz 2016). A mutual cognitive environment of similar mental representations helps the speaker and the receiver communicate successfully.

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Translation and Relevance

Just as Relevance Theory challenged a number of hitherto accepted theories of human communication, its application to translation (Gutt 1991 and elsewhere) undermined a number of assumptions made in translation theory (see also Sect. 5 below). Early linguistic approaches to translation followed in the footsteps of the code model of communication, arguing that translation was about encoding, rendering and decoding (compare the model of the translation process based on the Chomskyan concept of deep structure, Nida 1964). As explained above, for Sperber and Wilson

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communication is ostensive and inferential. Similarly, the traditional vision of translation was to consider the relation between the source and target text to be based on equivalence, for many years a central concept in early translation studies (Jakobson 1959; Nida and Taber 1969; Koller 1995). Achieving equivalence was seen as the goal of translation. The shift from linguistic to literary approaches to translation, in particular Descriptive Translation Studies, meant taking equivalence for granted rather than seeking it, as it was seen as an inherent feature of all translations (Toury 1980), very much as relevance is an inherent feature of communication for Sperber and Wilson. The application of Relevance Theory to translation, a prominent manifestation of the pragmatic turn in translation studies, meant a redefinition of the relation between the original and the target text, as Gutt’s approach considers it to be based on interpretive resemblance rather than equivalence. To a certain degree, the difference is merely terminological. Gutt (ibidem) sees translation as interpretive use of language, while Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (2014), for example, refers to equivalence as resemblance. However, there is more to interpretive resemblance than translational equivalence, both in practical and theoretical terms. Translation novices tend to understand equivalence as semantic sameness, rarely departing from the meaning and form of the original; while this is generally encouraged in specialised translation, it may lead to unacceptable translational solutions elsewhere, for instance in subtitling. From a theoretical standpoint, translation as a search for interpretive resemblance involves identifying the implicatures and explicatures of the source text and replacing them in the target text to account for differences in the source and target recipients’ respective cognitive environments. It constitutes a substantial departure from the philosophical approach to translation as rule-governed behaviour (Feleppa 1982). The guiding principle is always relevance, a notion more complex and abstract than explicit translation laws or norms. As Dicerto (2018: 55) observes, “Gutt’s theory may be somewhat intimidating for translators who, following this approach, would not be able to rely on a precise hierarchy of textual factors helping them in their choices”. Additionally, despite the numerous levels of equivalence, including pragmatic (Baker 1992), it remains confined to verbal features of texts and, thus, inapplicable to multimodal messages, including audiovisual texts. Interpretive resemblance, however, may be applied to multimodal texts, as evidenced by Dicerto (2018). Non-verbal communication also works on an ostensive-inferential basis.

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Seeking optimal relevance in translation can be understood as using “different strategies to try to recreate the cognitive effects intended by the source communicator with the lowest possible processing effort on the part of the target addressee” (Díaz-Pérez 2014: 108). This approach is not unrelated to Eugene Nida’s seminal principle of equivalent effect, which holds that “[t]he message of the original text is so transported into the receptor language that the response of the receptor is essentially like that of the original receptors” (Nida and Taber 1969: 200). The principle defines dynamic equivalence and remains the cornerstone of the thorny notion of translation quality assessment (TQA), which is discussed below for the sake of a more thorough understanding of relevance in translation.

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Assessing Translation Quality

TQA is, in fact, a complex concept that defies description in terms of simple, decontextualised taxonomies of criteria. The layman’s perspective on TQA, concomitant with the translation trainee’s strategy of survival in the translation classroom (above all, translation needs to be faithful), was ridiculed in the old adage about a woman, attributed to the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, which comes down to the inevitable choice between faithful and beautiful. Relevance Theory attempts to explain what faithful means in the communicative sense: “the speaker guarantees that her utterance is a faithful enough representation of the original: that is, resembles it closely enough in relevant aspects” (Wilson and Sperber 1988: 137). This goes to show that faithfulness in communication is not a binary notion (faithful or unfaithful), but a gradable one (more faithful or less faithful, depending on relevance). Similarly, in assessing translation quality, faithfulness is hardly an absolute; its presence, degree and judiciousness are always contextualised. In what is widely considered the most comprehensive work on TQA, House (1977) distinguishes between subjective/anecdotal, response-oriented, text-based and functional-pragmatic approaches. The use of related terms in the model (translation criticism of literary translations, translation evaluation in didactics, or translation quality assurance in industrial and corporate contexts) suggests that, understandably, assessing translations varies depending on what gets translated. Skopos theory (Vermeer 1978) essentially postulates that the translation process (and by extension criteria for quality assessment) is determined by the translation brief, which specifies why the source text gets translated in the first place. When applied to

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translation studies, the sociolinguistic concept of audience design focuses on who the translation is done for (Mason 2000). In the practice of translating, translators bear in mind these pronouns (what, how, why, who for and—too often most importantly—when for; compare the first paragraph of Chapter 1). The assumption underlying the application of Relevance Theory to translation is that, depending on the characteristics of the particular translation commission and the applicable criteria for evaluation, translators decide on the relevant global strategy or approach to the assignment and the particular techniques to solve individual problems involving cultural or linguistic untranslatability, rendering language variety, humour, terminology, etc. In written translation, the optimal approach is generally to strike a viable balance between form and content, the former arguably more relevant in the translation of literature, the latter in specialised translation. Otherwise, relevance in translation and related activities may (and does) vary. For instance, E. A. Gutt has this to say about interpreting: “since the stream of speech flows on, the audience cannot be expected to sit and ponder difficult renderings. […] Accordingly, the translator will often settle for renderings that resemble the original less closely but get across easily what he considers to be adequately relevant aspects of the original” (Gutt 2000: 390). Interpreting is essentially about helping two parties who don’t share a linguistic code to communicate. Accuracy matters in detail (e.g. figures in financial negotiations), but not necessarily in the wording. By the same token, audiovisual translation is not about faithfully rendering the dialogue in isolation. Firstly, the target audience can access visually transmitted information just as freely as the source-language audience, unless they are visually impaired; secondly, audiovisual translation constraints often prohibit a verbatim rendition of verbally transmitted information. As a result, relevant decisions in audiovisual translation are a function of what needs to be rendered (and what is therefore not redundant) and what may be rendered under the constrained circumstances. Gutt (1990) makes a significant distinction, which helps appreciate the importance of faithfulness in assessing translation quality. Namely, he distinguishes between direct and indirect translation. The dichotomy harks back to formal vs. dynamic equivalence (Nida and Taber 1969). Direct translation conveys the idea that translation should convey the same meaning as the original, so it “purports to interpretively resemble the original completely” (Gutt 1990: 154), whereas indirect translation allows more flexibility on the part of the translator and implies looser

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degrees of resemblance. The key notion, predictably, is relevance, as the resemblance between the original and its (indirect) translation concerns only the most relevant elements. Gutt adds that “[t]he idea that the meaning of the original can be communicated to any receptor audience, no matter how different their background, is […] a misconception based on mistaken assumptions about communication” (ibidem: 135). The notion of target audience’s cognitive effort (compare Sect. 2 above) is crucial in the application of RT to translation. Gutt (2000: 377) says that translation should be expressed “in such a manner that it yields the intended interpretation without putting the audience to unnecessary effort”. This simple criterion for TQA will be used to comment on the examples of subtitling in Chapter 5.

5

Relevance Theory as the Translation Theory

The definite article in the title of this section is deliberate. The bold claim that “there is no need for a distinct general theory of translation” (Gutt 1989: 75) suggests that Relevance Theory suffices to fully explain the nature of translation and account for all its complexities through the versatile notion of relevance. This assumption earned Gutt as many followers as it did critics (see Chapter 1 above). Controversial as it was at its time, though, the fact that it was made over thirty years ago is paramount to its appraisal. The development of translation studies and translation practice cannot possibly be equated with the evolution of Relevance Theory. In the 1980s, translation theory was past its linguistic and pragmatic turn and experiencing the cultural turn of Descriptive Translation Studies (Snell-Hornby 2006: 47). It was yet to undergo its other turns: interdisciplinary, multimodal, postcolonial, gender-based, empirical, globalisation, technological, psycholinguistic and—most importantly from the perspective of the present volume—audiovisual (cf. Chapter 6 below). The practice of translating thirty years ago differed from today’s even with respect to the less technologically bound translational activities, such as literary translation or consecutive interpreting. Therefore, while it was highly debatable whether Relevance Theory could act in lieu of translation theory in the 1980s, it would be preposterous to claim the same in the 2020s. My five-year work on a dictionary of translation studies terminology (Bogucki et al. 2019) has clearly shown to me the extent of today’s translation studies and the virtual impossibility of successfully enclosing it

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within a single coherent set of metalinguistic concepts, let alone a theoretical paradigm. Thus, despite worthy attempts (e.g. Blumczynski ´ 2016), it would seem a fallacy to claim both the necessity and the feasibility of the translation theory, understood as an all-encompassing methodological and conceptual construct capable of accounting for all translational phenomena. By extension, Relevance Theory is not it. What it is, however, is a versatile approach, perfectly suitable as a translation theory and particularly useful to practitioners due to its simple and convincing logic. Reiterating the detailed assumptions of Relevance Theory was not the aim of this section; neither was a thorough study of translation theory. Both would be unfeasible, given the constraints of the present work. Readers wishing to fully acquaint themselves with RT are advised to consult the highly useful online bibliography meticulously managed by Francisco Yus.1 It is hoped, however, that this brief glance at the “complexity in simplicity” that RT offers can shed some light on its usefulness in explaining subtitling practice. Before we embark on that, though, the audiovisual translation modality in question merits explanation.

References Allott, Nicholas. 2013. Relevance Theory. In Perspectives on Linguistic Pragmatics, ed. Alessandro Capone, Franco Lo Piparo, and Marco Carapezza, 57–98. Heidelberg: Springer. Ayasreh, Amer, and Razlina Razali. 2018. The Flouting of Grice’s Conversational Maxim: Examples from Bashar Al-Assad’s Interview during the Arab Spring. IOSR Journal of Humanities and Social Science 23 (5): 43–47. Baker, Mona. 1992. In Other Words. A Coursebook on Translation. London: Routledge. Blumczynski, ´ Piotr. 2016. Ubiquitous Translation. New York and London: Routledge. Bogucki, Łukasz, Joanna Dybiec-Gajer, Maria Piotrowska, and Teresa Tomaszkiewicz. 2019. Słownik polskiej terminologii przekładoznawczej. Kraków: Ksi˛egarnia Akademicka. Brumark, Åsa. 2006. Non-Observance of Gricean Maxims in Family Dinner Table Conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 38 (8): 1206–1238. Díaz-Pérez, Francisco Javier. 2014. Relevance Theory and Translation: Translating Puns in Spanish Film Titles into English. Journal of Pragmatics 70: 108–129. 1 https://personal.ua.es/francisco.yus/rt2.html, accessed on February 21, 2020.

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Dicerto, Sara. 2018. Multimodal Pragmatics and Translation. A New Model for Source Text Analysis. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Feleppa, Robert. 1982. Translation as Rule-Governed Behaviour. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 12: 1–32. Grice, Herbert Paul. 1975. Logic and Conversation. In Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts, ed. Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan, 41–58. New York: Academic Press. Grice, Herbert Paul. 1989. Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gutt, Ernst-August. 1989. Translation and Relevance. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 1, 75–94. Gutt, Ernst-August. 1990. A Theoretical Account of Translation—Without a Translation Theory. Target 2: 135–164. Gutt, Ernst-August. 1991. Translation and Relevance: Cognition and Context. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Gutt, Ernst-August. 2000. Translation as Interlingual Interpretive Use of Language. In The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti, 376–396. London and New York: Routledge. Horn, Laurence. 2005. Current Issues in Neo-Gricean Pragmatics. Intercultural Pragmatics 2 (2): 191–204. House, Juliane. 1977. A Model for Translation Quality Assessment. Tübingen: Narr. Verlag. Jakobson, Roman. 1959. On Linguistic Aspects of Translation. In On Translation, ed. Reuben Arthur Brower, 232–239. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Koller, Werner. 1995. The Concept of Equivalence and the Object of Translation Studies. Target 7 (2): 191–222. Levinson, Stephen. 2000. Presumptive Meanings. The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Levý, Jiri. 1967. Translation as a Decision Process. In [n. a.] To Honor Roman Jakobson: Essays on the Occasion of His 70. Birthday, 11. October 1966, 1171– 1182. The Hague and Paris: Mouton, reprinted in Lawrence Venuti (ed.). 2000. The Translation Studies Reader, 148–159. London and New York: Routledge. Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, Barbara. 2014. Equivalence. In Ways to Translation, ed. Łukasz Bogucki, Stanisław Go´zd´z-Roszkowski, and Piotr Stalmaszczyk, 11–54. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego: Łód´z. Mason, Ian. 2000. Audience Design in Translating. The Translator 6 (1): 1–22. Nida, Eugene. 1964. Toward a Science of Translating. Leiden: Brill. Nida, Eugene, and Charles Taber. 1969. The Theory and Practice of Translation. Leiden: Brill.

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Padilla Cruz, Manuel. 2016. Introduction. Three Decades of Relevance Theory. In Relevance Theory. Recent Developments, Current Challenges and Future Directions, ed. Manuel Padilla Cruz, 1–29. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Pedersen, Jan. 2011. Subtitling Norms for Television: An Exploration Focussing on Extralinguistic Cultural References. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Snell-Hornby, Mary. 2006. The Turns of Translation Studies: New Paradigms or Shifting Viewpoints? Benjamins Translation Library Vol. 66. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson. 1986. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson. 1995. Relevance. Communication and Cognition, 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell (The 2nd edition of Sperber and Wilson’s locus classicus is listed as a separate bibliographical entry due to the significant differences between the two editions, in particular regarding the formulation of the principle(s) of relevance.). Toury, Gideon. 1980. In Search of a Theory of Translation. Tel Aviv: The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics. Toury, Gideon. 1995. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Van Der Henst, Jean-Baptiste, and Dan Sperber. 2004. Testing the Cognitive and Communicative Principles of Relevance. In Experimental Pragmatics, ed. Ira Noveck and Dan Sperber, 141–171. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Vermeer, Hans Josef. 1978. Ein Rahmen für eine allgemeine Translationstheorie. Lebende Sprachen 23 (3): 99–102. Wilson, Deirdre. 2009. Relevance Theory. In The Pragmatics Encyclopedia, ed. Louise Cummings, 393–399. London: Routledge. Wilson, Deirdre, and Dan Sperber. 1988. Representation and Relevance. In Mental Representations: The Interface Between Language and Reality, ed. Ruth M. Kempson, 133–153. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilson, Deirdre, and Dan Sperber. 2002. Relevance Theory. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 14, 249–287. Wilss, Wolfram. 1994. A Framework for Decision-Making in Translation. Target 6 (2): 131–150.

CHAPTER 3

The Nature of Subtitling

Abstract This part positions subtitling on the broader scale of audiovisual translation. The latter has had a prominent place in translation studies for approximately three decades and continues to develop at a breakneck pace, fuelled by technological advances. Current norms and guidelines on subtitling will be discussed, along with state-of-the-art research, in particular reception studies. Keywords Subtitling · Norms · Guidelines · Reception studies

1

From Intertitles to Machine Translation and Beyond---Rendering Film in Writing

Well known to most viewers worldwide, subtitling can be defined as “a translation practice that consists of rendering in writing, usually at the bottom of the screen, the translation into a target language of the original dialogue exchanges uttered by different speakers, as well as all other verbal information that appears written on screen (letters, banners, inserts) or is transmitted aurally in the soundtrack (song lyrics, voices off)” (DíazCintas 2020). Uncontroversial as this definition may be, it does not take into account certain prominent characteristics of subtitling, such as its

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constraining nature and contextual dependence on visually transmitted information; these features will be expounded on below. Subtitling is one of the three main modalities of interlingual audiovisual translation (AVT), the others being dubbing and voice-over. Technically, it is versatile enough to be used in the cinema, on television, for durable media such as DVDs and BluRays, as well as online, for video-on-demand (VoD) and over-the-top (OTT) content.1 The most apparent feature distinguishing subtitling from the other two modalities is the shift in mode from spoken to written (see Chapter 4 below); this characteristic is key from the point of view of Relevance Theory, as it greatly influences the viewers’ processing effort (see Sect. 4 below). The decision as to which modality will be in use for a particular audiovisual text is motivated by a number of factors, the prominence of which has shifted over time. The audiovisual Europe has traditionally been divided into dubbing countries (e.g. France and Germany), subtitling countries (e.g. Sweden and Greece) and voice-over ones (e.g. Poland and Russia). The reasons for this delineation may be demographical (“large countries dub and small countries subtitle”, Fawcett 1996: 84), economic (dubbing is far more expensive than subtitling), political (censorship is possible in dubbing, as the original dialogue is never heard, but much less so in subtitling), historical (for example, voice-over originated in the Soviet Union and subsequently spread all over the Soviet bloc) or educational (subtitling requires literacy and is thus not the optimal choice in undereducated regions or for very young audiences). Age-related preferences are not only institutionalised (a particular programme is only available in dubbing, because it is intended for small children), but also personalised; as evidenced by surveys, certain age groups will favour certain AVT modalities, though they also have access to others. For instance, the Media Consulting Group (2011: 10) discovered that “the younger the respondents (aged 12–18 and 18–25) and the more languages they speak, the more pronounced is their preference for subtitling over dubbing”. Digital television and VoD services have provided viewers with a powerful tool hidden within the remote (or the interface of a web browser, in the case of OTT distribution), namely the ability to choose the audio track at the touch of a button. This has influenced not only the AVT market and reception studies done by AVT scholars, but also the internal policies 1 The technical distinction between VoD and OTT delivery is not pertinent to the discussion in hand, therefore, both are mostly used interchangeably.

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of VoD giants. Nguyen (2018) describes an experiment carried out by Netflix, whereby viewers were interviewed to reveal their film translation preferences with respect to foreign shows translated into English. When Netflix abode by popular demand and provided English subtitles to the French show Marseille, along with the dubbed version already available, they discovered that the viewers who watched the dubbed stream were more likely to finish the show than the ones who used the subtitles; this made the company set the dubbed version by default, with subtitles as an option. Incidentally, unlike traditional television, VoD makes it possible to obtain data on the consumption of the particular AVT modality, which is useful both for the content providers and AVT researchers. In contrast with intralingual captioning, a modality which provides subtitles for the deaf and the hard-of-hearing as a form of media accessibility, interlingual subtitling has been around for almost a century and continues to undergo significant changes in terms of its method of production and delivery, including constraints and target audience expectations, but also skopos. For instance, a relatively recent practice that remains grossly under-researched is so-called reverse subtitling (L1 to L2, instead of the usual L2 to L1 translation); this type of subtitling serves primarily to foster second language acquisition and learning (Ragni 2020). Developed as a natural successor of intertitles in silent cinema, subtitles started out as the manual projection of slides with printed text (the optical method), then they were stamped mechanically and thermally, etched chemically and finally cut by laser (Ivarsson 2004). Incidentally, though intertitles are not the focus of the present work, their use was very much in line with the basic assumption of Relevance Theory; appearing far less frequently than today’s subtitles, they could only contain what the filmmaker deemed indispensable for understanding the plot. In the digital world, subtitling is done with software, from simple freeware programmes for fansubbers, to costly, sophisticated multitool packages for professionals. This book does not aim at comparing and contrasting the particular subtitling tools, assessing their performance, or explaining how they work. That being said, an understanding of the technical aspect of modern subtitling, in particular the man-machine relationship, is important from the point of view of the present work. Today all translation is machine-assisted; it’s merely a matter of degree. At the lowest level of automatisation, the human translator takes full responsibility for the decisions and hence the quality, delivering a digital product with the help of word processing software. The middle (and most common) ground is the

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use of various tools, in particular terminological databases and translation memory, to deliver more consistent and accurate target texts considerably faster than without such facilities. The highest degree is full machine translation, traditionally pre-edited and post-edited by human translators as a quality assurance measure, recently less so, thanks to impressive advances in deep learning. Subtitling may be different in terms of actual execution, but at the conceptual level of man vs. machine it has a lot in common with specialised translation, for instance. Machine translation has been used in both amateur and professional subtitling for some years now (Bywood et al. 2017). Today, it is undisputed that subtitling and technology have what Jorge Díaz-Cintas aptly called an “umbilical relationship” (Díaz-Cintas 2018: 128). Technological advances have affected not only subtitle production methods, but also their positioning and, indirectly, their content. Once electronic timecode for cueing subtitles was introduced in the late twentieth century, manual positioning was no longer necessary. This led to more precise cueing and, by extension, higher reading speeds (Pedersen 2018: 85). Szarkowska (2016) conducted a large-scale survey on subtitle presentation and discovered that reading speeds vary from 9 to 17 characters per second, depending on country and medium, for instance 9–10 cps in Norway (but 17 cps for Netflix) as opposed to 15–17 cps in Poland. This is a significant difference, as in practice the spectrum means that viewers may devote most of their screen gazing time to reading subtitles or, conversely, focus largely on the picture, merely glancing over the subtitles. The survey showed that a maximum presentation time, typically imposed by the subtitling software, is required to provide viewers with ample time to comfortably read the subtitles and follow the film.

2

Intersemiotic Translation in Context

Among the earliest taxonomies of translation still in use today is the one by Roman Jakobson (1959), who distinguished between intralingual, interlingual and intersemiotic translation. AVT, let alone media accessibility, was non-existent at the time (though obviously films did get translated as such), but the triad is often linked to the type of translation under scrutiny here, as AVT may be all three: intralingual, interlingual and intersemiotic. In particular, the last is mentioned most frequently in theoretical discussions as a feature of AVT. Also known as transmutation, intersemiotic translation was defined as “an interpretation of verbal signs

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by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems” (Jakobson 1959: 233). As a matter of fact, AVT is not transmutation, but more frequently the reverse, an interpretation of the non-verbal by means of the verbal. A pertinent characteristic of any audiovisual text is its multisemiotic nature, as evidenced by the very adjective “audiovisual”. Viewers’ comprehension of an audiovisual message is an aggregate total of the information load conveyed both verbally and non-verbally, through the audio and video channel. This inevitably places AVT research within the framework of a paradigm that may not be addressed explicitly in the present work, but which nonetheless remains at the cornerstone of any discussion apposite to AVT, namely multimodality. As explained by Jewitt, the core assumption of multimodality is that “meanings are made, distributed, received, interpreted and remade in interpretation through many representational and communicative modes – not just through language – whether as speech or as writing” (Jewitt 2009: 14). Consequent to this, “any translation of film material should pay heed to the other semiotic modalities interacting with the verbal” (Taylor 2003: 194). Subtitling is notable for its contextual embeddedness. While the notion of context is pertinent to any translation, most target texts are independent per se. A Hungarian version of a Vladimir Nabokov novel can be enjoyed on its own; similarly, a Swedish translation of the instruction manual for a British-made home appliance is quite self-sufficient. Conversely, Hungarian or Swedish subtitles for a foreign movie exist in the contextual immediacy of the original dialogue and visually transmitted information and do not function (nor are they meant to function) without the latter. Whereas in the case of literary or specialised translation, quality assessment is usually a predetermined and deliberate exercise for translation students, teachers, researchers or validators, subtitling quality assessment may well be an inadvertent reflex for any viewer conversant with the language of the movie. As a result, scenarios like the one described by Nornes (1999: 17) are all too frequent: “all of us have, at one time or another, left a movie theater wanting to kill the translator. Our motive: the movie’s murder by ‘incompetent’ subtitle”. According to a survey,2 over 80% of modern movies feature English as the main or the only language. As most viewers in developed countries speak the language to some extent, subtitling English-language films into other tongues is 2 https://stephenfollows.com/languages-most-commonly-used-in-movies/, accessed on December 30, 2019.

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almost certain to result in instant and constant comparison of the original and the translation. This influences the reception of subtitling (and consequently subtitling practice) in more ways than one. Díaz-Cintas (2020) explains that subtitlers tend to preserve internationalisms and other words that are similar in both languages, as well as following the syntactic structure of the source text wherever possible. This incessant (though possibly subconscious) comparison of the target and source texts may also affect the overall cognitive effort expended while watching a movie with subtitles. On the one hand, visually transmitted information can act as a subtitling constraint (see Bogucki 2019: 72–76 for an illustration of humour translation based on wordplay and visually salient items); on the other hand, it provides comprehension clues, which allow the audiovisual translator to reduce the subtitles. Like any translation, the process of AVT involves constant decision-making; in the case of subtitling, the decisions amount to determining which communicative clues are redundant (i.e. negligible in the broader visual context) and which are necessary for comprehension—in other words, relevant.

3

Norms, Guidelines and Standards

Working on the ostensibly undisputed assumption that subtitling is translation (more on this in Chapter 4), like nearly all translation, it is done according to norms, “the social reality of correctness notions” (Bartsch 1987: 12). Translational norms may be set by the industry (such as the ISO 17,100 standard for providing translation services) or by academia (Chesterman 1997; Hermans 1999; Schäffner 1999; Toury 1995 and elsewhere). To quote arguably the best known definition of translation norms, they are “performance instructions appropriate for and applicable to particular situations, specifying what is proscribed and forbidden as well as what is tolerated and permitted in a certain behavioural dimension” (Toury 1995: 55). Of note in Toury’s definition is the reference to “particular situations” and “a certain behavioural dimension”—in other words, positioning norms in a situational context instead of an artificial vacuum. It is important to stress that norms, a subtype of translational constraints, are meant to guide the translator through the decision-making process, a key activity from the perspective of the present volume.

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The first item in Toury’s classification is the initial norm, which determines whether a translation is adequate (i.e. adheres to source norms) or acceptable (i.e. adheres to target norms). The distinction is notorious for its pessimistic tenor, as it implies that translation cannot be adequate and acceptable at the same time. As subtitling “often presents itself as an ultimately target-oriented translation method” (Gottlieb 2009: 25), the dominant criterion for subtitling quality assessment seems to be acceptability rather than accuracy (however, compare Pedersen’s take on the dichotomy of source vs. target norms below). The other seminal approach (Chesterman 1997) distinguishes between expectancy and professional norms. The former, “established by the expectations of readers of a translation” (Chesterman 1997: 64), are essentially target audience expectations, discussed in Chapter 4 below in reference to Bogucki (2004). The latter are subdivided into the ethical norm of accountability (professional integrity standards), the social norm of communication (which dictates that the translator should ensure maximum communication between the parties), and the linguistic norm of relation (which observes the relation between the original and the target text). Of these, the communication norm in particular appears pertinent from the standpoint of Relevance Theory and by extension the present discussion. As regards academic research on subtitle norms set within linguistic paradigms, Sokoli (2009) and Mubenga (2010) explored the application of Halliday’s systemic theory to a study of norms in subtitling. With respect to industry applications, “norms have gone from being national and mainly developed by public service broadcasters, to becoming international and determined by market forces” (Pedersen 2018: 86). Industry-level standardisation work seems to concentrate efforts on accessibility; in a study of standards for audio description and other methods of accessibility, Matamala and Orero (2018: 142) say that “there is no EU standard for [interlingual] subtitling”. At the end of the twentieth century, a notable attempt to systematise subtitling standards (Karamitroglou 1998) set out “to describe the various subtitling conventions being followed throughout Europe”. As it turned out, a pan-European set of guidelines was impractical due to numerous idiosyncratic differences in good practice between subtitling countries; instead, standards for particular regions developed, for instance Spain

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(Díaz-Cintas 2003) and Norway.3 Twenty years after Karamitroglou’s proposal, subtitling conventions seem to have lost their geographical import altogether, instead of evolving into codes of good practice, norms, regulations and guidelines set by film studios and streaming services or even embedded in subtitling software. Many professionals work with templates (Nikoli´c 2015), whose rationale is similar of that of translation memory tools—they limit the translator’s freedom, but ensure accuracy and consistency. Georgakopoulou (2019: 137) even referred to them as “one of the greatest innovations in the subtitling industry at the turn of the century”. In this context, the title of Jan Ivarsson’s influential textbook on subtitling from 1992 (“A Handbook of an Art”) may no longer be accurate, as almost three decades later the AVT modality is perhaps closer to science than art. However, reliance on partial automatisation (see also Sect. 1 above) does not mean that subtitling has obliterated its human dimension. Perdikaki and Georgiou (2020) conducted a survey among 170 subtitlers to discover that they do react emotionally to sensitive audiovisual material, dealing with emotive topics such as abuse, war, torture, death, etc. According to Pedersen (2020), five major leaps in the development of norms for AVT have shaped the practice of AVT, in particular subtitling. These milestones are: the introduction of sound films, television, personal computers, deregulation of the TV market, and, finally, streaming. While cinema and TV have not lost much of their original appeal, this is the age of VoD and, with 167 million subscribers worldwide as of January 2020,4 Netflix is certainly the market leader. What it means for the present work is that the analysis of Netflix subtitles is apposite to discussing the current developments in AVT from a normative standpoint. As Pedersen (ibid.) explains, “[w]hereas the old norms, which were based on public service broadcasting, developed in the target cultures, the new norms develop in the source culture”. Netflix norms, just like the guidelines provided by other streaming services, are prescriptive and internationalised. They are based on universal templates and are being localised as subtitlers request that they be revised according to local conventions (Pedersen 2018).

3 https://www.sprakradet.no/globalassets/sprakhjelp/skriverad/retningslinjer-for-godteksting.pdf, accessed on December 30, 2019. 4 https://www.businessinsider.com/netflix-market-share-of-global-streaming-subscr ibers-dropping-ampere-2020-1?IR=T, accessed on March 10, 2020.

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With respect to unofficial guidelines for good practice and tricks of the trade, subtitles aim to be “invisible” (Bannon 2010); Henri Béhar (2004: 85) famously said that “[s]ubtitling is a form of cultural ventriloquism, and the focus must remain on the puppet, not the puppeteer. Our task as subtitlers is to create subliminal subtitles, so in sync with the mood and rhythm of the movie that the audience isn’t even aware it is reading”. In a very interesting study of rendering humour in Finnish subtitles, Jaskanen (1999) described how Finnish audiences reacted to a joke in a subtitle not just after having read the subtitle, but only after the corresponding utterance on screen has been completed: “(…) the TL audience feel they don’t have a ‘licence’ to laugh before the SL audience do” (Jaskanen 1999: 46). However, more recently, eye tracking studies have provided ample evidence of the actual visibility of subtitles. On balance, subtitlers “[strive] to capture the essence of what is said while making sure that no information of crucial diegetic value is erased” (Díaz-Cintas 2020). The traditional rule that a subtitle must not exceed two lines continues to be the preferred practice, but its normative value is largely hampered by modern trends like cybersubtitling (Díaz-Cintas 2018), where threeand four-liners are par for the course, and dynamic placement of subtitles (Fox 2016). Moreover, Li (2016) reports on the increasing popularity of bilingual subtitles in some parts of the world; these naturally take up additional space and, even though a viewer would typically concentrate more—or even exclusively—on one of the two languages used, impinge on the cognitive effort expended (see also Liao et al. 2020). Subtitle length can directly affect processing and cognitive effort. In a recent study deploying methodological triangulation, Szarkowska and Gerber-Morón (2019) have confirmed that two-line subtitles are generally preferred over three-line ones and result in less cognitive effort, though comprehension is practically the same in both cases. Discussing cognitive effort and subtitling norms, by way of conclusion, we have arrived at two adjectives that characterise the AVT modality in question: additive and constrained. These characteristics create viable ground for research within the framework of Relevance Theory. Moreover, they are intertwined, as the additive nature of subtitling is in fact a subtitling constraint per se. Filmic messages are increasingly complex. Salt (2009) conducted a meticulous statistical analysis of changes in film shot duration over the 100 years of cinema, to discover that it has declined from an average of 12 seconds to approximately 2.5 seconds today. Movie audiences absorb considerable amounts of information delivered

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via the four semiotic channels of the filmic message, viz. picture, text on screen, soundtrack and dialogue. The foreign viewer gets subtitles as an added value, but it comes at a cost. Eye tracking studies (Perego 2012) reveal how viewers process subtitles on top of the already complex whole of the four semiotic channels of the original (image, writing, sound, and speech). For instance, increased processing effort results in intensified visual activity. Shot changes across subtitles for off-screen characters tend to result in increased re-reading of the subtitles. Conversely, using high-frequency lexemes or repeated words leads to a decrease in subtitle reading times (Perego and Ghia 2011: 181). Therefore, for the purposes of the present discussion, subtitling may be redefined as written translation of film dialogue and other verbally expressed information, positioned within the visual context of the audiovisual text, done with the help of software and templates according to external norms and internal guidelines, aiming at maximal information transfer and, simultaneously, minimal processing effort on the part of the target audience. The concept of processing effort will be the focus of the final section in this chapter.

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Processing Effort

The notion of processing effort is paramount from the perspective of Relevance Theory, which—as indicated in Chapter 2—argues that communication is basically about the balance between the said processing effort and the payoff. In the case of subtitling, “[i]t is the balance between the effort required by the viewer to process an item, and its relevance for the understanding of the film narrative that determines whether or not it is to be included in the translation” (Díaz-Cintas and Remael 2007: 147). As a result of information overload, subtitles put audiences to increased cognitive effort and therefore it is recommended that they be “inconspicuous” (Ivarsson and Carroll 1998: 75). After all, a typical filmic message, regardless of the genre, is meant for entertainment, and overly complex subtitles should not detract from it. Early academic accounts of subtitling recognised the curtailed nature of this modality, labelling it “constrained translation” (Titford 1982) and a “necessary evil” (“un mal nécessaire”, Marleau 1982). By contrast, Koolstra et al. (2002) discovered that a subtitled film puts the audience to greater cognitive effort than the same film in a dubbed version. The high degree of cognitive effort involved in processing subtitles as opposed to dubbing and voice-over was also confirmed through a reception study by Bogucki and Deckert (2018).

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The additive nature of subtitling does not refer merely to information overload compared to the original filmic message. Subtitles, being what they are (letters superimposed on the image), occupy part of the screen, thereby contaminating the visual channel. Occasionally, relevant visual clues may be obscured by the subtitle; alternatively, in order for the subtitle not to obscure the image or to be sufficiently visible in the case of low contrast background, it may be displayed at the top of the screen. All of the above result in increased effort in processing the entire filmic message (Bogucki 2019). Cornu and O’Sullivan (2016) report how the creators of the Austrian Film Museum in the 1960s were unwilling to screen subtitled prints for aesthetic reasons, since the titles were believed to distract from the image. In this work, the processing effort expended while reading subtitles is not measured experimentally or researched introspectively. Instead, its existence, relative value, and importance are presupposed. Further research is necessary for a more comprehensive understanding of how audiences process subtitles. The limitations of the format in which the present volume is distributed only allow for the presentation of instances of subtitling which adhere to or flout the principle of relevance and thereby limit or increase the audience’s cognitive effort. This methodology should be seen as a choice, not a shortcoming. The corpus of approximately 70 examples taken from 36 movies aired on Netflix is hoped to be quite representative in portraying relevance-conditioned decision-making in subtitling, despite the analyses being of an inevitably subjective nature. However, before the corpus is presented, it is necessary to juxtapose the foci of the two preceding chapters in order to develop a processual model of relevance as a factor in subtitling.

References Bannon, David. 2010. The Elements of Subtitles, Revised and Expanded Edition: A Practical Guide to the Art of Dialogue, Character, Context, Tone and Style in Subtitling. lulu.com. Bartsch, Renate. 1987. Norms of Language: Theoretical and Practical Aspects. London and New York: Longman. Béhar, Henri. 2004. Cultural Ventriloquism. In Subtitles on the Foreignness of Film, ed. Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour, 79–86. Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Alphabet City Media Inc.

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Bogucki, Łukasz. 2004. A Relevance Framework for Constraints on Cinema Subtitling. Łód´z: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego. Bogucki, Łukasz. 2019. Areas and Methods of Audiovisual Translation Research, 3rd ed. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Bogucki, Łukasz, and Mikołaj Deckert. 2018. Badanie preferencji dotycz˛acych przekładu audiowizualnego w´sród polskich widzów. In Mi˛edzy tekstem a kultura. ˛ Z zagadnien´ przekładoznawstwa, ed. Piotr Chruszczewski and Aleksandra Knapik, 252–267. AE Academic Publishing. Bywood, Lindsay, Panayota Georgakopolou, and Thierry Etchegoyhen. 2017. Embracing the Threat: Machine Translation as a Solution for Subtitling. Perspectives 25 (3): 492–508. Chesterman, Andrew. 1997. Memes of Translation. The Spread of Ideas in Translation Theory. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Cornu, Jean-François, and Carol O’Sullivan. 2016. The Translation of Films: History, Preservation, Research, and Exhibition. Journal of Film Preservation 94: 25–31. Díaz-Cintas, Jorge. 2003. Teoría y práctica de la subtitulación: inglés-español. Barcelona: Ariel. Díaz-Cintas, Jorge. 2018. ‘Subtitling’s a Carnival’: New Practices in Cyberspace. The Journal of Specialised Translation 30: 127–149. Díaz-Cintas, Jorge. 2020. The Name and Nature of Subtitling. In The Palgrave Handbook of Audiovisual Translation and Media Accessibility, ed. Łukasz Bogucki and Mikołaj Deckert. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Díaz-Cintas, Jorge, and Aline Remael. 2007. Audiovisual Translation: Subtitling. London and New York: Routledge. Fawcett, Peter. 1996. Translating Film. In On Translating French Literature and Film, ed. Geoffrey T. Harris, 65–86. Rodopi: Amsterdam and Atlanta. Fox, Wendy. 2016. Integrated Titles: An Improved Viewing Experience? In Eyetracking and Applied Linguistics, ed. Silvia Hansen-Schirra and Sambor Grucza, 5–30. Berlin: Language Science Press. Georgakopoulou, Panayota. 2019. Template Files: The Holy Grail of Subtitling. Journal of Audiovisual Translation 2 (2): 137–160. Gottlieb, Henrik. 2009. Subtitling Against the Current: Danish Concept, English Minds. In New Trends in Audiovisual Translation, ed. Jorge Díaz-Cintas, 21–43. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Hermans, Theo. 1999. Translation in Systems. Descriptive and System-Oriented Approaches Explained. Manchester: St. Jerome. Ivarsson, Jan. 2004. A Short Technical History of Subtitles in Europe. Available from http://www.transedit.se. Ivarsson, Jan, and Mary Carroll. 1998. Subtitling. Stockholm: TransEdit.

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Jakobson, Roman. 1959. On Linguistic Aspects of Translation. In On Translation, ed. Reuben Arthur Brower, 232–239. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jaskanen, Susanna. 1999. On the Inside Track to Loserville, USA: Strategies Used in Translating Humour in Two Finnish Versions of ‘Reality Bites’. Unpublished dissertation, Helsinki University. Available from http://ethesis.helsinki.fi/jul kaisut/hum/engla/pg/jaskanen/. Jewitt, Carey. 2009. An Introduction to Multimodality. In The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis, ed. Carey Jewitt, 14–27. London and New York: Routledge. Karamitroglou, Fotios. 1998. A Proposed Set of Subtitling Standards in Europe. Translation Journal 2 (2). Koolstra, Cees M., Allerd L. Peeters, and Herman Spinhof. 2002. The Pros and Cons of Dubbing and Subtitling. European Journal of Communication 17 (3): 325–354. Li, Mingyue. 2016. An Investigation into the Differential Effects of Subtitles (First Language, Second Language, and Bilingual) on Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition. PhD thesis. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh. Liao, Sixin, Jan-Louis Kruger, and Stephen Doherty. 2020. The Impact of Monolingual and Bilingual Subtitles on Visual Attention, Cognitive Load, and Comprehension. The Journal of Specialised Translation 33: 70–98. Marleau, Lucien. 1982. Les sous-titres… un mal necessaire. Meta 27 (3): 271– 285. Matamala, Anna, and Pilar Orero. 2018. Standardising Accessibility: Transferring Knowledge to Society. Journal of Audiovisual Translation 1 (1): 139–154. Media Consulting Group. 2011. Study on the Use of Subtitling. Brussels: European Commission. Available from https://publications.europa.eu/en/public ation-detail/-/publication/e4d5cbf4-a839-4a8a-81d0-7b19a22cc5ce. Mubenga, Kajingulu Somwe. 2010. Investigating Norms in Interlingual Subtitling: A Systemic Functional Perspective. Perspectives 18 (4): 251–274. Nguyen, Hanh. 2018. Netflix: Here’s Why the Dubbed Version of Foreign Shows Like ‘Dark’ and ‘3%’ is the Default Setting.” IndieWire. Available from http://www.indiewire.com/2018/03/netflix-dubbed-tv-shows-defaultsubtitles-1201937425. Nikoli´c, Kristian. 2015. The Pros and Cons of Using Templates in Subtitling. In Audiovisual Translation in a Global Context, ed. Rocio Baños Piñero and Jorge Díaz-Cintas. Palgrave Studies in Translating and Interpreting. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Nornes, Abé Mark. 1999. For an Abusive Subtitling. Film Quarterly 52 (3): 17–34.

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Pedersen, Jan. 2018. From Old Tricks to Netflix: How Local are Interlingual Subtitling Norms for Streamed Television? Journal of Audiovisual Translation 1 (1): 81–100. Pedersen, Jan. 2020. Audiovisual Translation Norms and Guidelines. In The Palgrave Handbook of Audiovisual Translation and Media Accessibility, ed. Łukasz Bogucki and Mikołaj Deckert. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Perdikaki, Katerina, and Nadia Georgiou. 2020. Investigating the Relation Between the Subtitling of Sensitive Audiovisual Material and Subtitlers’ Performance: an Empirical Study. The Journal of Specialised Translation 33: 153–175. Perego, Elisa (ed.). 2012. Eye Tracking in Audiovisual Translation. Rome: Aracne. Perego, Elisa, and Elisa Ghia. 2011. Subtitle Consumption According to Eye Tracking Data. In Audiovisual Translation. Subtitles and Subtitling. Theory and Practice, ed. Laura Incalcaterra McLoughlin, Marie Biscio, and Máire Áine Ní Mhainnín, 177–196. Bern: Peter Lang. Ragni, Valentina. 2020. More Than Meets the Eye: An Eye-Tracking Study on the Effects of Translation on the Processing and Memorisation of Reversed Subtitles. The Journal of Specialised Translation 33: 99–128. Salt, Barry. 2009. Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis, 3rd ed. London: Starword. Schäffner, Christina. 1999. Translation and Norms. London: Multilingual Matters. Sokoli, Stavroula. 2009. Subtitling Norms in Greece and Spain. In Audiovisual Translation: Language Transfer on Screen, ed. Jorge Díaz-Cintas and Gunilla Anderman, 36–48. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Szarkowska, Agnieszka. 2016. Report on the Results of an Online Survey on Subtitle Presentation Times and Line Breaks in Interlingual Subtitling. Available from avt.ils.uw.edu.pl. Szarkowska, Agnieszka, and Olivia Gerber-Morón. 2019. Two or Three Lines: A Mixed-Methods Study on Subtitle Processing and Preferences. Perspectives 27 (1): 144–164. Taylor, Christopher J. 2003. Multimodal Transcription in the Analysis, Translation and Subtitling of Italian Films. In Screen Translation. Special Issue of the Translator, vol. 9 (2), ed. Yves Gambier, 191–206. Studies in Intercultural Communication. Titford, Christopher. 1982. Subtitling: Constrained Translation. Lebende Sprachen 27 (3): 113–116. Toury, Gideon. 1995. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

CHAPTER 4

Towards a Relevance-Theoretic Model of Decision-Making in Subtitling

Abstract This chapter consolidates the findings of the previous two with a view to constructing a model of the process of subtitling. The model will place less emphasis on technological aspects (use of software, positioning/cueing, etc.), and more on linguistic and translational decisions conditioned by the principles of relevance and the optimalisation of cognitive effort. In line with Relevance Theory, greater cognitive effort should be offset by extra benefits, therefore the audience should only be put to excessive processing effort if there is additional information value, e.g. linguistic humour based on wordplay. Recourse is made to a much earlier work on a similar topic (Bogucki 2004). Keywords Subtitling process · Cognitive effort · Context

1

Introduction---The Original Model

In an earlier work on the application of Relevance Theory to subtitling (Bogucki 2004), I proposed the following model of constraints on subtitling (Fig. 1), whereby the audiovisual translation (AVT) modality under scrutiny is supported on three pillars representing three types of constraints. The first one, the constraint of relevance, is in essence a meta-constraint, in that it conditions all translational actions. The second © The Author(s) 2020 Ł. Bogucki, A Relevance-Theoretic Approach to Decision-Making in Subtitling, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51803-5_4

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Fig. 1 A model of constraints on subtitling (Bogucki 2004: 86)

pillar refers to translational constraints in the parlance of Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) (Hermans 1999; Toury 1995)—norms and conventions filtered by target audience expectations, as well as individual idiosyncrasies. Thirdly, technical constraints are at work, in particular spatial limitations on subtitling. The triangle represents the interrelations between the three types of constraints, all of them filtering the audiovisual translator’s choices to result in a product that is relevant, acceptable, and technically appropriate. While the general assumption underlying the model continues to be valid with respect to the role of relevance in secondary communication for media purposes, in the present work, a complete overhaul is proposed. Thus, the current volume is not intended as a rehash of the original model, but as a completely fresh proposal, merely acknowledging the existence of the approach from 16 years ago and its relative significance for AVT studies at the time. The original model (Bogucki 2004) was conceived before VoD revolutionised entertainment, and has thus lost much of its pertinence due to dramatic changes in the practice of subtitling. For instance, it omits to mention guidelines on subtitling and codes of good practice issued by the industry, because at the time subtitling standards were considerably different from today’s norm (cf. the discussion on norms and guidelines in Chapter 3). As will be made apparent in Sect. 6 of the present chapter, the graphical representation of the proposed model has very little in common with that of the 2004 one. Therefore, to reiterate, the original model only serves as an introduction to the current one.

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Assessment---Towards a New Model

In order to examine the status of the three pillars of the original model in today’s academic and professional reality, and decide whether they can be applicable to the revised model, let us scrutinise their import one by one. As the significance of relevance (the first pillar of the 2004 model) is already highlighted in the title of the present work, let us leave it till last, focusing first on technical limitations and target audience expectations. Technological advances have inevitably altered technical limitations on, and target audience expectations of, subtitling. As indicated in Chapter 3, from a production perspective, subtitle length can now vary to a greater extent than in pre-streaming days, though in terms of reception shorter subtitles continue to be preferred. Subtitling software takes care of a number of other technicalities, such as cueing, which have ceased to be a concern to audiovisual translators. It can, therefore, be concluded that technology has made the production of subtitling far easier than before, but increasing information overload in filmic messages may adversely affect the consumption of subtitles. Let us, therefore, look at the other variable, viz. target audience expectations. The middle pillar in the original model referred to translational constraints as seen within the framework of DTS, in particular the normative approaches of Toury (1995) and Chesterman (1997); they differ from technical limitations as, despite the derogatory name, they are beneficial to the process of (audiovisual) translation in that they help the translator choose from among the paradigm of possible equivalents. The assumption that all translation, including audiovisual, is done for an audience has not lost its inherent validity in that (human) translations are never done in a vacuum, outside a situational context which includes the characteristics of the intended recipient. However, in the age of collaborative translation, the concept of “target audience” may need revision. The traditional pragmatic dichotomy of “us and them”, as in the translator and their readership, has lost much of its import. Today, the translator is very much (part of) the audience. Deregulation of the profession, resurgence of non-professional translation, proliferation and wider availability of translation software, crowdsourcing, emergence of prosumers in translation and otherwise, advances in translator training—all these developments have contributed greatly to creating a new translation reality, whereby the line between the creator and the recipient is very thin indeed. This observation is valid across most translation types, but particularly in AVT. Therefore,

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it makes much less sense today to speak of target language expectations influencing the audiovisual translator’s decision the way it did twenty or so years ago, when the market was much more hermetic and self-contained. Admittedly, the DTS paradigm was established in answer to vexing questions about the nature of literary translation, therefore its applicability to other translation types may be seen as limited. However, the concepts of norm, convention, constraint and expectation, used liberally in DTS, are not confined to this paradigm and are versatile enough to explain a number of phenomena pertaining to a range of translation types, notably audiovisual. The first pillar (relevance), remains the key foundation of both the original model and the present work; given the decreasing significance of technical limitations and the somewhat altered character of target audience expectations, its role grows ever more prominent. While recognising the status of relevance as a meta-constraint, the original model (Bogucki 2004) attempted, somewhat unsuccessfully, to fit it within the framework of the two other pillars, the audience’s expectations on the one hand and the spatial and temporal limitations on the other. As explained above, both seem to have diminished in importance or modified due to the changing practice of subtitling. Therefore, in the present approach, the importance of relevance (however tautological it may sound) grows further, making it a benchmark for assessing the (accuracy and) acceptability of subtitling. In order for the benchmark to be operationable, however, one needs to ascertain whether the notion of relevance yields itself to a concrete, measurable description.

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Relevant Subtitling

However, before we proceed with discussing relevance, let us return to the AVT modality in question. As established in Chapter 3, subtitling is constrained by its nature. Experimental (e.g. eye tracking) research on subtitling has demonstrated that nearly any subtitle superimposed on the original audiovisual text detracts from the appreciation of the polysemiotic message and increases the audience’s cognitive effort (cf. Kruger et al. 2013; Kruger et al. 2015). In order to minimise this unwanted effect on the viewer, subtitles aim at being inconspicuous and unobtrusive. While the maximum number of characters per line continues to be a requirement in most cases, despite technological advances in subtitling software, a shorter subtitle is not always easier to process than a longer

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one. Conversely, a succinct subtitle that is in stark contrast to a lengthy dialogue in a language with complex politeness patterns (e.g. Japanese), may result in increased cognitive effort, leaving the audience puzzled as to why a polite excuse is rendered as an abrupt “No”. Additionally, an extremely condensed subtitle simply fails to do its job, that is to say, to convey information and achieve equivalence, as any translation aims to. Incomplete information transfer naturally results in increased cognitive effort. In view of the above, since verbal curtailment and lexical economy do not seem to be a universal recipe for optimum subtitling, the concept of relevance should be considered as a viable alternative. As long as the subtitler correctly determines what is relevant in each case and the decision-making process proceeds according to the principle(s) of relevance, optimalisation of the cognitive effort is likely. Two questions arise at this point: a heuristic one and an axiological one. Firstly, what is the applicability of a cognitive-pragmatic theory of linguistic communication to the actual practice of AVT? Secondly, how does one gauge the “correctness” or acceptability of a “relevant” solution; in other words, to return to the problem posed at the end of Sect. 2 above, is relevance measurable? Soon after Gutt’s (1991) seminal application of Relevance Theory to translation, two scholars—Kovaˇciˇc (1993) and Fawcett (1996)—recognised the potential of RT in researching film translation. The former focused on reduction as a subtitling strategy and emphasised the role of relevance in teaching subtitling as a decision-making process. The latter commented on RT that “[t]his recent introduction to the field of translation studies very clearly applies to the phenomenon of film translation” (Fawcett 1996: 79). It is significant, because, at the time, AVT studies was in its infancy at best or non-existent at worst. Fawcett goes on to explain that “what appears in a translated film will follow the principle of what the translator deems to be relevant in the complex of symbols with which he or she is dealing at any given moment. Within the translation of one and the same film, however, what is relevant will be in constant flux, subjected to the vagaries of constantly changing constraints, and controlled by the assumptions of the system of film translation prevalent in a given community” (Fawcett 1996: 80). However, a potential problem with the application of Relevance Theory to subtitling lies at the very core of RT as a post-Gricean approach to the pragmatics of communication. The starting point of RT is that

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a sentence meaning is a vehicle for conveying a speaker meaning, an intention fulfilled by being recognised; the speaker’s meaning is not decoded, but inferred from their (contextual) behaviour; finally, inferring the speaker’s meaning is guided by the expectation of certain standards of communicative behaviour, be they Grice’s cooperative principle or a presumption of optimal relevance (Wilson 2017: 80). Subtitling is written representation of spoken dialogue, which is originally written as a film script, bearing every semblance of authentic conversation, yet differing from it in terms of intention, ostension and recognition. In plain language, both Grice’s approach and Relevance Theory apply to authentic communication, while subtitling is the translation of scripted and acted communication. A question arises, therefore, whether an application of RT to subtitling is indeed methodologically feasible. There are essentially two methodological concerns: subtitling being translation, and film dialogue being merely an approximation of natural communication. The first has been tackled and time-tested (Gutt 1991; Bogucki 2004). According to Gutt (1991, 2000), translation is a form of secondary communication, in other words interlingual interpretive use of language (cf. also “translation is an instance of normal human communication”; Gutt 1989: 76). Considerable criticism has been levelled at Gutt, predominantly for attempting to create the all-encompassing theory of translation, applicable to both “the translation of sacred religious texts and, on the other hand, the translation of cereal boxes and travel brochures” (Smith 2002: 108). Granted, the Bible, functional texts, legal treatises, instruction manuals, poetry and film dialogues have very little in common in terms of function, text type conventions, layout, lexis, register, style, target audience, etc.; yet they are all translated, however different the process may be in each case, and the end result is an instance of interlingual interpretive use of language. On balance, there is universal agreement as regards subtitling being translation (cf. Luyken et al. 1991; Georgakopolou 2009). As regards the second reservation, film is admittedly a work of fiction, an artistic creation without a pretence to render the actual state of affairs in any of its aspects, including sound, colour, camerawork, etc. The script (hence the dialogue) is meant to suit the particular work of art and function seamlessly with its other elements, rather than to be an exact representation of the way people actually communicate. The concern that it is not natural communication as such can be addressed with the help of a notion, which has received considerable attention in the Relevance

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Theory framework, and which has already been mentioned in passing throughout this work, viz. context. Rather conveniently, context can also help address the other problem mentioned above, that is the measuring of relevance. Relevance Theory describes the relation between context and relevance as quite straightforward: “other things being equal, an assumption with greater contextual effects is more relevant” (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 125). Gauging relevance is, then, often a matter of measuring contextual effects.

4

Contextualisation of Film

The psychological notion of context is defined in Relevance Theory as “the set of premises used in interpreting [an] utterance, [which may include] expectations about the future, scientific hypotheses or religious beliefs, anecdotal memories, general cultural assumptions, [and] beliefs about the mental state of the speaker” (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 15). Thus, contrary to common belief, context is not limited to the immediate textual environment of the utterance. This concept is directly related to the notion of manifestness (see Chapter 2, Sect. 1). According to Wilson (2017: 82), “a context comprises mentally represented information of any type – beliefs, doubts, hopes, wishes, plans, goals, intentions, questions, etc. – and is constructed or selected in the course of the comprehension process from a range of potential contexts available to the individual”. A natural communication incident takes place in a context, but then so does film dialogue. In film, the diegesis, the other semiotic channels apart from the dialogue, as well as the audience’s mentally represented information, make up the context in which the dialogue is embedded. What the actors say is neither interpreted not translated by itself, in a vacuum. It is merely a part of the entire filmic message, which in turn is only one instance of the audience’s collective cultural expertise. It may be typical of a genre or a director’s style, addressed to a specific audience or intertextually linked to other filmic messages or other products of popular culture. All of these factors will inevitably influence the perception and comprehension of the entire filmic message in the macro context and each line of the dialogue in the micro context. As “human cognition tends to be geared to the maximisation of relevance” (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 260), the original audience attempt to interpret the original filmic message in what they consider to be the most relevant way possible, given the mental mechanisms of

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their respective cognitive systems. By extension, the audiovisual translator and, eventually, the target audience attempt to do the same. Of course, multiple interpretations incur an increasing risk of misinterpretation. Sperber and Wilson (1986: 142) explain the multilayered nature of context as follows: “[a]t the end of each [inferential] process, the individual has at his disposal a particular set of accessible contexts. This set is partly ordered: each context (apart from the initial context) contains one or more smaller contexts, and each context (apart from maximal contexts [i.e. the contexts that cannot be extended further]) is contained in one or more larger contexts”. As indicated above, film dialogue bears semblance to authentic conversation, but it is in fact a written script, spoken by actors, usually rid of the common disorder of natural spoken language, such as hesitations, redundancies, non sequiturs, unfinished sentences, etc. Th.e audience are presented with the immediate visual context, similar to the textual environment of an (spoken or written) utterance. On top of this, there is the cognitive environment, which may differ from one audience to another, as well as from one viewer to another. The notion of truth, present in Sperber and Wilson’s definition of manifestness, is somewhat more complex in film diegesis than in real life, because of willing suspension of disbelief. When exposed to entertainment such as film, theatre or literature, audiences willingly accept what they would normally disbelieve. Master Yoda could not possibly be 900 years of age, Frodo Baggins and his friends the dwarf and the elf could not be on a mission to toss a cursed ring into a fiery mountain, Superman could not fly through the air, Martians never invaded the Earth, even Commander James Bond could not have accomplished some of his feats in reality; all adult viewers know this, which does not stop them from enjoying the respective movies. Additionally, whether for lack of original script ideas or out of a desire to make more money, an increasing number of films are based on bestselling books. Reviews often say that, while a given movie may be acceptable per se, it is not a faithful representation of the book it is an adaptation of, and therefore it is disappointing (and “untrue”) to the part of the audience who are familiar with the literary version. In this case, the audience’s cognitive environment includes knowledge of the original written work, which should be taken into account not only by the film scriptwriter and director, but also–if the original work has been translated—the film translator.

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According to the communicative principle of relevance (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 158), relevance is the default option, that is to say the addressee of an utterance assumes (infers) that it is relevant in the context. Asked for the time by a stranger in the street, we assume that they want us to consult our watch or smartphone. Film diegesis is again more complex in this respect. According to Bell (1984), there are four types of receivers in communication, viz. addressees, auditors, eavesdroppers and overhearers. Filmic audiences are auditors, while characters are addressees. When addressed, characters in film typically react in a natural way, but their reactions are scripted (they may be ad-libbed by actors, but rarely, and only with the director’s permission). However, auditors also presume optimal relevance, though they are not directly addressed. We go to a movie in good faith and assume that the dialogue and scenes are relevant to establishing the intended atmosphere and telling the story. Guillot (2010: 68) says that “film dialogue itself is fabricated discourse, shaped by the demands of the medium and the fact that it is designed for an overhearing audience: it provides contrived versions of interpersonal exchanges”. Thus, in answer to the methodological concerns voiced above, the following is argued here: the notion of relevance applies to subtitling, but not in the same way that it applies to ostensive-inferential interlingual human communication; as the key variables—the message, the context, and the participants—are markedly different. The message in subtitling is deliberately curtailed, made to form a seamless semiotic whole with the image and the sound. The “smaller” (to use Sperber and Wilson’s terminology) audiovisual context is purposely artificial; the audience are aware of witnessing an artistic creation, more or less resembling the real world. The “larger” context of the target audience’s cognitive environment may be similar to that of the source audience, but more often than not it is different (see above). Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, instead of a simple dichotomy of the sender and the receiver, the participants of an act of subtitling are the actors, acting out the script as instructed by the director, the audiovisual translator, mediating in the communication between the film creators and the foreign audience, and the passive viewers (though the latter are increasingly more active thanks to interactive entertainment methods). The context of AVT is also much more complex than that described by Sperber and Wilson (above). Let us for instance consider the notion of paratext, “liminal devices and conventions, both within and outside the book, that form part of the

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complex mediation between book, author, publisher and reader: titles, forewords, epigraphs and publishers’ jacket copy” (Genette 1997: i). Originally thought of as accompanying printed literature, peritexts (physically attached to the main text, such as a blurb), and epitexts (physically detached, e.g. critics reviews, cf. Pym 2011: 87) are just as common in the world of AVT. While (or perhaps because) collaborative translation is currently a prominent trend, it is all too common for the main audiovisual text and its paratexts to be translated into the same language by different translators not consulting each other or each other’s work. Intertextuality (cf. Kristeva 1980; Neubert 1980; de Beaugrande and Dressler 1981) is a related, but far more complex issue. For the purposes of the present discussion, intertextuality is understood as the occurrence of references to texts of all manner in audiovisual productions. In essence, intertextuality is a translation constraint; the (audiovisual) translator is well advised to recognise intertextual references and decide on applicable translation techniques accordingly. Failure to appreciate paratextual and intertextual references is particularly frowned upon in the case of film adaptations of literature, comic books, or games. In those cases, target audience expectations are high, both when it comes to the adaptation itself and its translation. A movie based on a book which has had more than one translation into the language is usually subtitled (or dubbed, or voiced-over) paying heed to one of the translations of the literary work, in particular when it comes to proper names (cf. Bogucki 2004). Similarly, popular movie quotes (e.g. Colonel Kilgore’s “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” from Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now), when reiterated or adapted in other audiovisual texts (e.g. “I love the smell of diamonds in the morning” in Disney’s The Legend of Tarzan), should best be translated in a way that the target audience find familiar from the original audiovisual production. López González (2015) studied animated movies dubbed into Spanish to conclude that the target audience’s world knowledge is limited in the case of children, thus their ability to recognise and appreciate intertextual references will be far less pronounced than in adult viewers. A number of examples of intertextuality and paratextuality from a relevance perspective are presented in Chapter 5, Sects. 5 and 8 respectively.

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Relevance, Film Translation and Processing Effort

Relevance Theory “starts from the idea that there is normally much more going on in the environment of any human being than it could pay attention to, and certainly much more than it could mentally process fully” (Allott 2013: 60). Film is an on-screen visual (and verbal) representation of the world, packed with stimuli of all kinds; however, the audience are not participants, but merely observers, hidden behind “the fourth wall”. Immersive audio and attempts at so-called 4D or 5D cinema are thus far little more than gadgets, though the impressive headway of virtual reality certainly makes viewers hopeful for a cinematic semblance of real life. Unlike in reality, the viewer takes no responsibility for the development of events, except in interactive shows. Even though a filmic message is but a stripped-down approximation of reality observed from a distance, in a passive and non-participatory way, the four semiotic channels intertwined together create a virtual environment that takes considerable effort to process. Subtitles, the fifth semiotic channel, supplementary to the main four and in particular the audio-verbal one, raises the bar even further. As evidenced by eye tracking studies, subtitles momentarily divert attention from the visual stimuli on the screen. Put to additional effort, the human mind takes from the subtitles what is relevant and necessary for comprehension. There is no rule of thumb to determine what exactly that is. Films are not created equal, nor is all dialogue equally complex semantically, stylistically and syntactically. Roman Polanski’s ´ Carnage or Woody Allen’s Annie Hall are heavily dialogue-based, while for instance John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place or J. C. Chandor’s All is Lost barely have any. Furthermore, the four main semiotic channels will contribute in some, more or less pronounced way to overall comprehension, even if the audience do not speak the language of the original. If one were to draw parallels between media accessibility and interlingual AVT, a visually impaired viewer will make little (but still some) sense of a film without audio description solely on the basis of the audio channels; a foreign viewer will make more sense of a film in a language s/he is unfamiliar with without subtitles and even more sense of a movie in a language s/he knows to a degree, still requiring some mode of AVT for satisfactory comprehension. Therefore, if subtitles are difficult to process, in relevance-theoretic terms they must provide some payoff. In a recent study of Chinese subtitles from a relevance-theoretic perspective, Chen

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and Wang have confirmed that the incorporation of visual messages into subtitling, whereby “both visual information and source verbal information are verbally conveyed but visually presented through subtitles” (Chen and Wang 2019: 210) enhances the degree of relevance “through aiding viewers’ processing effort and boosting contextual effects” (ibidem: 194). This is a curious development, as ostensibly it stands in contrast to the original reasoning of RT, namely that “the addition of new information which merely duplicates old information does not count as an improvement” (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 106). Two related conclusions can be drawn at this point. Firstly, a relevance-theoretic observation that apparently contradicts Relevance Theory does not have to be dismissed as invalid, since, at the time of conception Sperber and Wilson’s seminal approach could not possibly account for all the intricacies and complexities of communication as we know it today. “Old information” and “new information” hark back to the classic Hallidayan distinction between theme vs. rheme and given vs. new information (Halliday 2004 and elsewhere). However, in the world of film mimesis, diegesis and translation, the dichotomy often proves insufficient. Secondly (and in line with the first conclusion), AVT is a very peculiar, multilayered instance of communication. Braun (2016) uses Relevance Theory and an approach to human reasoning called Mental Model Theory (Johnson-Laird 1983) to observe that “[a] view of AVT as constrained […] seems to ignore the complexity of the comprehension process in AVT. Moreover, the specific translation strategies required in AVT arguably pose a further challenge for the translator, calling for deep processing in the target text production phase as well” (Braun 2016: 304). Therefore, in the next and final section of this methodological chapter, a model of relevance-conditioned decision-making in subtitling as a mode of AVT and, thereby, secondary communication will be drawn, to help visualise all this complexity. Note, however, that the graphical representation is highly approximate and simplified; for the sake of visual clarity, it fails to include a number of factors that have received considerable attention throughout this discussion, viz. (processing/cognitive) effort, manifestness or intention. In a manner of speaking, the graphical rendition of the process follows the logic of relevance in that it is stripped down to the bare essentials.

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The New Model

As noted above, the following graphical representation of decisionmaking in subtitling is merely a rough approximation. It cannot be hoped to illustrate all decisions that all subtitlers make, but it can be indicative of the main factors that influence the making of systemic choices in typical subtitling scenarios. The process of decision-making is further illustrated by a range of categorised examples in Chapter 5 below. Again, however, the categories are far from exhaustive and are introduced mostly for organisational purposes. The model is also meant to be compared (or rather contrasted) with the original proposition (Bogucki 2004). As can instantly be seen, there are significant differences between the two models. However, despite the graphical incompatibility, the underlying assumption remains largely the same for both propositions (Fig. 2). The proposed model places special importance on the notion of context, as defined in Relevance Theory (Sect. 4 above and elsewhere throughout this text). All subtitling decisions are contextualised. The small context is the immediate surrounding of the dialogue contained within the same filmic message; in other words, the visual semiotic channel of the audiovisual text. The large context is the cognitive environment of the audience reflected through the cognitive environment of the subtitler, the latter being the bottleneck of the former. The subtitler decides whether the cognitive environment of the target audience matches that of the source audience; in the event of a mismatch, the next decision to take is what language means to deploy for the target text (the subtitle) to be relevant to the target audience. However, if the subtitler’s own cognitive environment is insufficient to make an informed decision, the resulting subtitles will suffer quality-wise and relevance-wise. A subtitler who fails to recognise the context and the contextual characteristics of the source and target audiences will generate a product that is inferior and will lead to misunderstanding or heavily increased processing effort. The small context is naturally contained within the large one. While the small context of the original and the foreign version is (almost) the same,1 the respective large contexts do not have to be, as the cognitive baggage (real-world knowledge) of the foreign audience will likely 1 The diagram shows these as largely overlapping, but not fully; this is done for the sake of visual clarity, but also to account for minute differences (possibly altered text on

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Fig. 2 The proposed model of relevance-driven decision-making in subtitling

differ from that of the source audience; the difference will be the more apparent the more the audiovisual text is embedded in the source culture. The large context of the target text directly influences the target audience expectations, hence the arrow at the bottom of the diagram. Once the contextual implications have been properly identified and accounted for by a, hopefully, competent subtitler, the end product is generated with the help of specialised software, but with the human in charge, taking decisions and responsibilities within the bounds imposed by the machine and rooted in guidelines and conventions (such as time

screen) and the slightly different perception of the image by both audiences due to having to process subtitles, as evidenced by eye tracking studies.

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and space restrictions). Because of these, the main decision is always what is relevant enough to be included under the applicable constraints. The selection of language means deployed to render the dialogue in its visual environment ideally follows the logic of minimax—low processing effort resulting in high cognitive effects.

References Allott, Nicholas. 2013. Relevance Theory. In Perspectives on Linguistic Pragmatics, ed. Alessandro Capone, Franco Lo Piparo, and Marco Carapezza, 57–98. Heidelberg: Springer. Bell, Allan. 1984. Language Style as Audience Design. In Sociolinguistics: A Reader and Coursebook, ed. Nikolas Coupland and Adam Jaworski, 240–250. New York: St Mattin’s Press Inc. Bogucki, Łukasz. 2004. A Relevance Framework for Constraints on Cinema Subtitling. Łód´z: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego. Braun, Sabine. 2016. The Importance of Being Relevant? A Cognitive-Pragmatic Framework for Conceptualising Audiovisual Translation. Target 28 (2): 302– 313. Chen, Yuping, and Wei Wang. 2019. Semiotic Analysis of Viewers’ Reception of Chinese Subtitles: A Relevance Theory Perspective. Journal of Specialised Translation 32: 194–216. Chesterman, Andrew. 1997. Memes of Translation. The Spread of Ideas in Translation Theory. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. De Beaugrande, Robert, and Wolfgang U. Dressler. 1981. Introduction to Text Linguistics. London: Longman. Fawcett, Peter. 1996. Translating Film. In On Translating French Literature and Film, ed. Geoffrey T. Harris, 65–86. Rodopi: Amsterdam and Atlanta. Genette, Gerard. 1997. Paratexts. Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Georgakopoulou, Panayota. 2009. Subtitling for the DVD Industry. In Audiovisual Translation, ed. Jorge Díaz-Cintas and Gunilla Anderman, 21–35. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Guillot, Marie-Noëlle. 2010. Film Subtitles from a Cross-Cultural Pragmatics Perspective. The Translator 16 (1): 67–92. Gutt, Ernst-August. 1989. Translation and Relevance. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 1, 75–94. Gutt, Ernst-August. 1991. Translation and Relevance: Cognition and Context. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

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Gutt, Ernst-August. 2000. Translation as Interlingual Interpretive Use of Language. In The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti, 376–396. London and New York: Routledge. Halliday, Mark Alexander Kirkwood. 2004. Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar, 4th ed. revised by Christian Matthiessen. London and New York: Routledge. Hermans, Theo. 1999. Translation in Systems. Descriptive and System-Oriented Approaches Explained. Manchester: St. Jerome. Johnson-Laird, Philip. 1983. Mental Models. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kovaˇciˇc, Irena. 1993. Relevance as a Factor in Subtitling Reduction. In Teaching Translation and Interpretation 2: Insights, Aims, Visions, ed. Cay Dollerup and Anne Lindegaard, 245–251. John Benjamins: Amsterdam and Philadelphia. Kristeva, Julia. 1980. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. New York: Columbia University Press. Kruger, Jan-Louis, Agnieszka Szarkowska, and Izabela Krejtz. 2015. Subtitles on the Moving Image: an Overview of Eye Tracking Studies. Refractory : A Journal of Entertainment Media 25: 1–14. Kruger, Jan-Louis, Esté Hefer, and Gordon Matthew. 2013. Measuring the Impact of Subtitles on Cognitive Load: Eye Tracking and Dynamic Audiovisual Texts. Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Eye Tracking South Africa, 62–66. López González, Rebeca Cristina. 2015. Dubbing Intertextuality in Dreamworks Animated Films. In Accessing Audiovisual Translation, ed. Łukasz Bogucki and Mikołaj Deckert, 11–26. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Luyken, Georg Michael, Thomas Herbst, Jo Langham-Brown, Helen Reid, and Herman Spinhof. 1991. Overcoming Language Barriers in Television: Dubbing and Subtitling for the European Audience. Manchester: European Institute for the Media. Neubert, Albrecht. 1980. Textual Analysis and Translation Theory, or What Translators Should Know About Texts. Linguistische Arbeitsberichte 28: 23–31. Pym, Anthony. 2011. Translation Research Terms: a Tentative Glossary for Moments of Perplexity and Dispute. Available from http://isg.urv.es/public ity/isg/publications/trp_3_2011/pym.pdf. Smith, Kevin. 2002. Translation as Secondary Communication. The Relevance Theory Perspective of Ernst-August Gutt. Acta Theologica Supplementum 2: 107–117. Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson. 1986. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson. 1995. Relevance. Communication and Cognition, 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell (The 2nd edition of Sperber and Wilson’s

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locus classicus is listed as a separate bibliographical entry due to the significant differences between the two editions, in particular regarding the formulation of the principle(s) of relevance.). Toury, Gideon. 1995. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Wilson, Deirdre. 2017. Relevance Theory. In Oxford Handbook of Pragmatics, ed. Yan Huang, 79–100. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 5

Application of the Model

Abstract This empirical section is aimed at illustrating the practice of subtitling with a view to demonstrating how subtitlers, knowingly or not, make use of the principles of relevance in their work. In the case of translation errors, it is shown how the quality of subtitling could have been improved by following the general rules and principles of relevance. Keywords Subtitling quality assessment · Translation problems · Subtitling techniques

1

Introductory Remarks

This chapter scrutinises a range of examples taken from the corpus of audiovisual texts available on Netflix for streaming in Poland. The texts are feature films (Hollywood blockbusters, European productions and Netflix’s original content), TV shows, documentaries, and standup comedy programmes. For the sake of convenience, the examples are arranged to illustrate a selection of translation problems and techniques. Their import varies greatly. Cultural specificity, linguistic untranslatability, and intersemiotic relationships are given far more attention than, for example, deixis or positioning issues. However, distinct as they may be, all the examples are chosen to demonstrate the overriding feature of © The Author(s) 2020 Ł. Bogucki, A Relevance-Theoretic Approach to Decision-Making in Subtitling, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51803-5_5

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subtitling within the framework of the present monograph: the quest for relevance. In no way is the catalogue of subtitles intended as errorhunting. Some instances may be less felicitous than others, but the analysis does not aim at a criticism of Netflix’s quality assurance system. The decision to extract the corpus of examples from Netflix was, quite naturally, dictated primarily by expedience. As early as 2016, Netflix could be streamed virtually anywhere in the world, except North Korea and Syria (Fetner et al. 2016). Its expansion is concomitant with the soaring popularity of over-the-top media distribution, perhaps not quite replacing physical media, but certainly competing very hard. However, there is also a methodological explanation. As indicated before, the audiovisual material under scrutiny represents various genres. Thus, the analysis of techniques for obtaining relevance in subtitling is not limited to those dictated by the particular genre, for example, canned laughter in sitcoms as an ostension to render humour. What the examples have in common is the target language and the commissioner (the streaming service). Netflix has their own guidelines and quality standards, which subtitles must adhere to. Translational constraints, narrowing down the spectrum of the subtitler’s choices, are thus at work. Moreover, the subtitler’s profile is significant. Having launched its streaming service in Poland, Netflix was on the lookout for freelancers who could provide Polish subtitles to the films on offer: “[t]he company [Netflix] also created an online subtitling and translation test and invited people from all over the world to apply. Thousands did” (Burling 2019: 95). As a result, Netflix’s hired hands occupy the uncharted territory between professional and non-professional translators. They are neither fansubbers, translating for their own and others’ pleasure with the help of freeware, more often than not under ethically and even legally dubious circumstances, nor trained professionals with experience working for TV and film studios. Apart from recruiting freelancers via the Hermes test system, Netflix also commissions subtitles from independent companies and buys assets (used subtitle files) from other distributors (Pedersen 2018: 87). Netflix publishes online timed text style guides, both general and language-specific, for 36 different languages.1 The guides are quite short; the general one is a set of merely 14 rules providing advice on matters

1 https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/sections/203480497-Timed-TextStyle-Guides?page=1#articles, accessed on June 3, 2019.

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such as duration, file format, line breaks, positioning, etc. The languagespecific guides, also succinct, tackle some technical issues, but seem to focus on translation problems, such as how to handle foreign dialogue, songs, expletives, etc. In his study of Netflix guidelines, Pedersen (2018) concludes that “new norms are imposing a one-size-fits-all system, which is then adjusted post hoc [and] instead of descriptive norms developing into prescriptive ones, these are prescriptive norms that are starting to incorporate descriptive norms” (Pedersen 2018: 97). In other words, “initially prescribed norms, set out with the general requirements and in the various language versions, are currently being localised by adding local norms describing local practices” (ibidem). In today’s age of multimodality, a book on various methods of transmitting information seems grossly incomplete without visuals. Whatever modality of audiovisual translation (AVT) is used, the resulting target text is a rendition of the dialogue in its visual context. The audiovisual translator’s task is to determine how meaningful clues available to the audience via the other semiotic channels, in particular the visual ones, complement, substitute, interpret or possibly contradict the information contained in the dialogue (cf. Bogucki 2019). The subsequent decisions about which equivalents would be suitable and which translation techniques to deploy in case of a lack of equivalence are taken accordingly. Therefore, representation of the visual in analysing and assessing subtitles, ideally by means of screenshots from the scrutinised scenes, would be very handy. However, in this work examples are given merely along with a brief contextual description of the scene and without a corresponding screenshot. There are essentially three reasons for this sparseness: copyright issues, the limitation of the format in which this book is published, and following the logic of Relevance Theory. With respect to the last, it seems advisable to offer the reader only so many details as are necessary to comprehend the particular translation problem and its solution, without having to expend unnecessary cognitive effort on processing illustrative screenshots. The length of instances of originals and translations in this section varies, so does the contextual embedment. Whenever a decontextualised presentation of only the textual layer suffices, any irrelevant information is omitted; however, if the particular issue under scrutiny necessitates a context description, or any background information, these are duly provided.

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Despite the preponderance of Polish subtitles throughout this work, the approach is not language-specific. Any Polish subtitles are backtranslated into English, so as to explain the translation shifts to the English-speaking readership. The translation problems illustrated by the examples would potentially occur in other languages, though admittedly not all. For instance, the mechanisms and potential pitfalls of rendering forms of address out of English into Polish (the latter having a distinction into formal and neutral/informal personal pronouns) would work similarly out of any other T language into a V language.2 Taxonomies of translation procedures (e.g. Newmark 1988), subtitling techniques (Gottlieb 1992; Bogucki 2004) and AVT research areas (Bogucki 2019) are never comprehensive or foolproof. There is a considerable gap between the needs of students, who desire a universal template to deploy in their own projects, and the potential of researchers, who realise that such a template can only be an incomplete approximation. Boundaries are fuzzy at best and categories result too often from multiple instances of a particular behavioural pattern observable in a parallel corpus, not from a holistic scrutiny of all the facets of the translation process. As the classification below inevitably suffers from the same symptoms, its goal is by no means to serve as a complete categorisation of AVT problems, potentially solvable through the application of Relevance Theory. The categories are merely instances of frequently occurring phenomena. They are presented in order of relative importance or prominence. With respect to the transcription of subtitles, the following convention has been applied throughout this chapter: a single slash (/) indicates a line break (a two-line subtitle), a double slash (//) indicates a new subtitle, while curly brackets ({}) contain a gloss back-translation into English of the Polish subtitle. Dashes (-) indicate two characters in dialogue as two lines of the same subtitle. Hardly any example is longer than one twoline subtitle and most are one line or less; therefore, for the sake of not disrupting the continuity of reading, examples are provided as running text, not separate paragraphs or tables.

2 These terms are explained in Sect. 6 below.

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The Visual and the Verbal

The relationship between the visual and the verbal is key to understanding AVT. Dialogue and picture do not exist independently of each other, and subtitles take recourse to information transmitted via the visual semiotic channel. In the instances below, visually transmitted information is either pertinent to understanding verbally transmitted information, or acts as a contextual constraint, heavily limiting the paradigm of choices available to the subtitler. One of the best known examples of intersemiotic complementariness is the scene from Pulp Fiction, where Uma Thurman’s character (Mia Wallace) talks to John Travolta’s character (Vincent Vega), who is reluctant to accept her choice of dinner venue. Mia says “Don’t be a…” and draws a square (more precisely, a rectangle) in the air. In order for secondary communication to adhere to the principle of relevance in this particular case, the subtitles cannot merely translate the unfinished sentence, hoping for the audience to comprehend the message, as the Polish word for “square” is not used colloquially to refer to an oldfashioned person. The subtitle “Nie b˛ad´z zgredem do…” implies the use of square as in a number multiplied by itself, used colloquially in the Polish language to mean “particularly”. A viable back-translation of the Polish subtitle could thus be {Don’t be such a big fuddy-duddy}. Thanks to technological advances, text on screen, one of the four semiotic channels of a filmic message, is now theoretically translatable, should the audiovisual translator deem it relevant. Admittedly, for the time being, this option is still heavily limited. MinaLima, the graphic design studio responsible for the visuals in the Harry Potter series and its spinoffs, deployed advanced techniques in the movie Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Thanks to these, newspaper columns can not only be animated, but also edited, hence, translated. The dubbed version available in Polish cinemas made use of this option. The wide availability of such techniques, and hence translatability of this semiotic channel, is still to come, but when it does, audiovisual translators may have to address technical blunders like the one below. In the ultimate episode of the penultimate season of Prison Break, an incarcerated character receives a newspaper with a headline that says “Tancredi arrested for murder”. This is a key plot development, as the character (General Krantz) harbours a grudge against Tancredi, so he hopes to have his revenge now that she is in the female prison next door.

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The newspaper headline, Tancredi’s photo and the accompanying text are shown in three scenes for a total of 10 seconds—long enough for the observant viewer to notice that the ostensible newspaper article is in fact an excerpt from an academic paper or monograph, possibly on linguistics; the excerpt goes like this: “Further, this selectionally introduced contextual feature is functionally equivalent to, though formally distinct from, any communicatively programmed computer techniques. The notion of level of grammar adds explicit performance limits to the anticipated fourth generation analysis. (etc.)”. This is an instance of shoddy filmmaking, the fixing of which is currently outside the realm of AVT. However, the grossly irrelevant passage puts an observant viewer to an increased cognitive effort. A visually salient element in the third season of Prison Break is a field guide to birds, used by a character to conceal important clues, which he has written down on the pages. Another character, briefly in possession of the book, finds a note saying “8x10” (visible to the audience) and guesses that it might refer to the size of a storage room. He promptly enters the room, measures it with a tape measure and says to himself “eight by ten”. The Polish subtitle is “Dwa i pół na trzy” {Two and a half by three}. What the subtitler did was convert feet into metres; a decision that was both unjustified given the strategy of foreignisation and wrong from the perspective of the clash between the visually transmitted information (text on screen) and the subtitle translation, which puts the audience into the extra cognitive effort of having to calculate or at least approximate the units of measurement to make the necessary mental connection between the subtitle and the note in the bird book. In Woody Allen’s Manhattan Murder Mystery, the protagonist Larry Lipton is talking to a hotel cleaning lady regarding a woman that he and his wife are after. On receiving information, he produces a banknote and hands it over to the cleaner. She looks surprised and disappointed, to which he says “What are you making a face for? He’s the father of our country”. Off-screen, his wife says “Are you coming?”. The subtitler, faced with overlapping dialogue and culture-specificity, decides to forgo the latter in favour of the former: “-Co robisz tak˛a min˛e? / -Przyjdziesz tu?” {Why the face? Are you coming?} The line “He’s the father of our country” is left out. To the American audience, the message is clear; the father of the USA is George Washington, whose face is on the $1 bill, therefore the tip is of the lowest possible denomination. The foreign (Polish or otherwise) audience might not be that familiar with USD

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banknotes anyway (thus merely translating the line would not be particularly helpful), and the pragmatic and cynical side of Larry has already been revealed, as the scene appears towards the end of the movie. The intended message (low tip) can therefore be inferred without attempting to render culture-specificity; the cleaning lady’s disappointed face is an obvious visual hint. Ouicksand (Störst av allt ) is a Swedish Netflix crime series. The brutal opening scene is composed of sounds of gunfire and hysteria, as well as images of blood and bodies on a classroom floor. A visually salient element is a broken coffee mug bearing the inscription “VÄRLDENS BÄSTA PAPPA” {world’s best dad}. Although the cup appears merely 10 seconds into the movie, when the audience are trying to conceptualise what is going on, the subtitler decided the inscription was relevant and provided ´ the literal translation: “NAJLEPSZY TATA NA SWIECIE”. This is a controversial decision, as the image is that of general mayhem after a school shooting; diverting the target audience’s attention towards the text on a teacher’s mug by providing a caption may be seen as flouting the principle of relevance. Additionally, it violates Netflix’s guidelines, which explicitly state that “[f]orced narrative titles for on-screen text should only be included if plot-pertinent”.3 In John Wick, the titular character, receives a puppy as a gift, complete with a dedication card with a daisy flower on it. The puppy has a name tag on its neck. Wick reads the name on the tag and says “Daisy… Of course”. The Polish subtitles read: “Daisy… No jasne”. {Daisy… Of course.} The fairly literal translation requires an increased cognitive level from the Polish audience. The message in the original is clear, as the daisy is one of the most recognisable flowers and the association between the picture on the card and the puppy’s name is instantaneous. The Polish subtitler left the dog’s name untranslated, thereby rendering Wick’s sentiment regarding the pup’s name obscure to the non-English-speaking audience. This assortment of examples is intended to show the interdependence of the semiotic channels of the filmic message and its translation. The moving picture and in some cases the text on screen are concomitant to comprehending the dialogue and by extension the corresponding subtitles. The audiovisual translator’s job is to achieve relevance, minimising the audience’s cognitive effort and maximising their contextual effect. 3 https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/216787928-Polish-TimedText-Style-Guide, accessed on March 11, 2020.

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Admittedly, a triangulated study combining eye tracking and reception/comprehension check would be in order, so as to obtain hard, measurable data; eye tracking would be of particular use in the case of dependence on visual clues. However, such a study is outside the limits of the present work.

3

Culture-Specificity

The importance of culture in translation has been highlighted at least since the cultural turn in the 1990s (Nida 1998; Snell-Hornby 2006). Techniques in translating culture-specific items (CSIs) depend largely on the translation strategy (see e.g. the discussion on cultural substitution below). In the case of audiovisual texts, rendering culture-specificity is exacerbated by the presence of the multiple semiotic channels, firmly positioning the text in a given cultural setting. A literary work may be set in a particular place and time, but its reception by the target audience from a different place and time may be manipulated by the translator (hence “the Manipulation School”, Hermans 1985). The audiovisual translator is less likely to manipulate the original, as there is only so much he or she can do, given the constraints of the visual channel. In the Tall Grass is Netflix’s adaptation of a Stephen King novella. One of the characters, named Ross, is guiding a party of four through a grass field and singing Midnight Special as they plod along. To make conversation, one of the party (Travis) asks casually “That CCR?”. The Polish subtitle is “To zespół CCR?” {Is this the band CCR?}. While the full name of the band (Creedence Clearwater Revival ) and the song itself may be familiar to some Polish viewers, they are certainly not as famous in Poland as they are in the USA. The acronym is hardly ever used here, which must have prompted the subtitler to add the word “band” in the Polish translation. Even so, the full name would not violate the rules of subtitle length and would arguably result in less cognitive effort on the part of the Polish audience; similarly, most audiences—other than American—would probably find the acronym ambiguous. In The Laundromat, a black character is arguing with his (black) daughter. On hearing that she means to go back to Africa, he grabs her suitcase and says “OK, Marcus Garvey, slow down”. The Polish translation is “Nie b˛ad´z taki Marcus Garvey! / Nigdzie nie jedziesz”. {Don’t be such a Marcus Garvey! You’re going nowhere.} Very little known in

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Poland, Marcus Garvey was a black nationalist and self-proclaimed Provisional President of Africa in the first half of the twentieth century. The subtitle remains obscure except to a handful of history-savvy viewers, but the situational context makes it evident that the father is comparing the daughter to an historical figure or celebrity and is critical of her behaviour. In Sully, two characters are relishing their recent rise to fame: “(Jeff) Six months from now we’ll just be laughing over how we got to meet David Letterman. (Sully) We’re doing David Letterman?”. The original dialogue requires extralinguistic knowledge to understand what “doing” David Letterman might mean; however, this knowledge is widely accessible, as Late Night with David Letterman and subsequently Late Show with David Letterman are very well known to English-speaking audiences worldwide. The Polish subtitle is more specific, as the verb used suggests a show of some kind. Interestingly, the host’s first name is missing from the Polish subtitle. “Za pół roku b˛edziemy si˛e s´mia´c, / ze ˙ poznali´smy Lettermana // Wyst˛apimy u niego?” {in six months we will be laughing that we met Letterman. Will we appear on his [show]?} In another scene, Sully and Jeff, the plane’s first officer, are handed fresh clothes at the hotel after an emergency landing. Jeff does not like the clothes he gets and makes a remark. Carl’s response is as follows: “KMart was the only store open. It’s Queens at ten in the evening. You find a Brooks Brothers”. The Polish subtitle is heavily condensed: “Tylko Kmart był czynny. Jest 22.00”. {Only Kmart was open. It’s 10 p.m.} The extralinguistic culture-specific knowledge element here is that KMart is a discount store, while Brooks Brothers is an upmarket menswear chain. Arguably, neither is widely known to Polish audiences, yet the former is retained, while the latter is left out. The following example comes from Birdman, the story of a Broadway actor, formerly a superhero movie star. The action revolves round the theatre and acting. A wannabe says to a famous actor: “I saw you in ‘Hothouse’ at the Geffen”. The Geffen Playhouse is a theatre in Los Angeles, in Poland known only to sophisticated theatre-goers (the name Geffen is typically associated with a record label). For this reason, the subtitler decided to replace it with the name of the playwright who wrote the play, Harold Pinter—a name that is far more likely to achieve recognition in the target culture than the Geffen: “Widziałam ci˛e w „Cieplarni” Pintera” {I saw you in Pinter’s “Hothouse”}. Murder Mystery is a Netflix crime comedy, loosely based on Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. In one scene, a Japanese heiress

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mocks the main female character’s financial status: “(Suzi) You’re the one whose shoe’s still got a sticker from Marshalls on it. (Nick) They’ve got name brands now. (Audrey) These are from Target”. Both Marshalls and Target are American department store chains, very well known in the US, but absent from Europe. The former is akin to TJ Maxx, known in Europe as TK Maxx; Nick aims to note that they also stock upmarket brands. The Polish subtitler opted for cultural substitution and omission. Instead of the two brand names, the Polish CCC (a Polish shoe store chain, very popular and cheap) and the German Zalando (a European leader of e-commerce) are used: “- W koncu ´ nosisz buty z CCC. / - One s˛a z Zalando”. {After all, you wear CCC shoes. They’re from Zalando.} Cultural substitution is always risky; as a translation technique, it is closely dependent on the global translation strategy. In the case of domestication, cultural substitution is acceptable, as the overriding goal is to bring the text closer to the reader, thus, proposing culture-specific solutions that the target readership find familiar is justified. However, domestication is hardly ever the strategy of choice in subtitling, for two reasons. Firstly, in most cases it is impossible to bring the other semiotic channels “closer to the viewer”; a film set in Australia can hardly pretend to be set in Scandinavia, though it may come with Swedish subtitles. Secondly, the additive nature of subtitling means that the original dialogue is still audible, revealing the true provenance of the audiovisual text. In this particular example, despite globalisation, it is unlikely a Japanese character would immediately recognise a Polish price sticker and an American one would wear shoes purchased online in Europe, especially on the first day of her first-ever trip to the continent. Omission may generally be in line with subtitling constraints and the application of Relevance Theory. In this particular case, Audrey’s husband’s comment “They’ve got name brands now”, pertaining to Marshalls’ retail strategy, is not subtitled at all. It is not the aim of the present study to improve on existing subtitles by suggesting alternative solutions, but had the subtitler opted for “TK Maxx” instead of “CCC”, the rendition would not only be more accurate (and less culturespecific), but also contextually more appropriate for the comment about name brands to be translated. In fact, Nick makes the same comment twice in a row; the audience are then exposed to unnecessary cognitive effort, wondering what he might be saying and why his utterance is left untranslated.

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Units of measurement are a subtype of culture-specificity (compare also the example from Prison Break in Sect. 2 above). In Episode 8, Season 6 of The Big Bang Theory, titled The 43 Peculiarity, Howard and Raj are trying to figure out what Sheldon does in a storage room each day for 20 minutes. They break into the storage room and see a chalkboard with the number 43 written on it. Puzzled, they attempt to discover the number’s significance, coming up with more and more farfetched theories. At one point, Howard says “What’s 43, besides my mom’s neck size?”. The Polish subtitle, quite literally, reads: “Co to jest 43, poza rozmiarem szyi / mojej mamy?” {What’s 43, besides my mum’s neck size?}. Throughout the entire sitcom, Howard’s mother can barely be glimpsed, featuring in one or two episodes, but her obesity is frequently joked at. This particular joke comes off as absurd, since no human being could possibly have a neck of 43 inches. Interestingly, the Polish translation comes across as far less preposterous and consequently far less funny, because it is perfectly possible for even a mildly overweight person or a stout one to have a neck size of 43 centimetres. Conversations with a Killer. The Ted Bundy Tapes is a Netflix documentary about one of America’s best known serial killers. The voice on tape begins the recording by saying “The date is two - twenty one - seventy eight”. The Polish subtitle misrenders the date: “Jest drugi lutego 1978 roku”. {It’s February the second, 1978} The mistake might have been overlooked by the Polish audience were it not for a later part of the same recording, where Bundy’s girlfriend is asked what she did on February 16th; obviously, if the recording had been made on February 2nd, no such question would have been posed. The error is arguably due to the US date format (month first); the “two” at the beginning must have confused the careless subtitler, surely accustomed to the European date format. An account of a murder scene in the documentary mentions the victim’s head being found “25 to 50 yards” away from the body. The Polish translation is consistent in converting units of measurement from imperial to metric, but in this particular case the conversion is simply too exact to be relevant. In the Polish subtitle, the distance is “jakie´s 23-46 metrów” {some 23–46 metres}. While it does correspond to 25–50 yards, the original measurement is simply a ballpark figure and rendering it as exact rather than rounded up is inappropriate. In her seminal work postulating an integrated approach to translation studies, Mary Snell-Hornby famously remarked that “the extent to which

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a text is translatable varies with the degree to which it is embedded in its own specific culture, also with the distance that separates the cultural background of source text and target audience” (Snell-Hornby 1988: 41, original emphasis). The principle seems perfectly applicable to audiovisual texts, in particular comedic ones; Monty Python is perhaps the best known, but definitely not the only example of culture-specific audiovisual humour. However, due to their multisemiotic nature, audiovisual texts are more complex than monosemiotic ones, therefore an analysis of translation problems and translation quality assessment in the case of audiovisual texts has to take into account more factors. The visual semiotic channel may be an asset in rendering culture-specificity, but it may just as easily be a hindrance. Again, the subtitler should ideally strive to achieve contextual relevance.

4

Wordplay

Play on words, for instance punning, is another common translation problem, which may result in rendering (or failure to render) verbally expressed humour or achieving (failing to achieve) other positive cognitive effects. In one scene of Sully, the titular character—a pilot already famous for his heroic feat of landing his plane on the Hudson river to save the passengers and crew—goes to a bar and is served a new drink named after him. The bartender explains that the drink contains “a splash of water”, a pun on the splash of river water that the landing plane generated. This is followed by an extralinguistic marker of humour, a burst of laughter from the other punters at the bar. The Polish translation is “duzo ˙ wody” {a lot of water}, as the polysemy of the English noun “splash” (a small amount added to a drink and the effect of something falling into liquid) could possibly not be rendered in the target language. In Birdman, an actor orders a sunbed in order to achieve the physical features of the character that he plays, to which another actor responds: “He wants to be a real redneck”. The humorous ambiguity is aptly rendered into Polish. The Polish word for “redneck” translates literally as “beetroot”, thus the wordplay based on the colour that the body typically assumes when exposed to tanning is preserved “Chce by´c prawdziwym burakiem” {He wants to be a real beetroot}. The title of the last episode of the first season of Prison Break is Flight; this is quite an obvious choice, given that the series is about an escape

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from a high security prison, which the protagonists are about to effect towards the end of Season One. However, this is also a red herring thrown at the audience; the escapees plan to use a chartered plane to fly out of Chicago, but eventually the plan falls through and the plane flies away without the prisoners on board. Mid-way through the season, having read the title of the last episode, the audience might think that the escape will be successful and its method will be by air. The Polish translation is “Lot”, which manages to render only the prototypical meaning of “flight”, that is flying through the air, but not fleeing. The protagonist of Prison Break, Michael Scofield, refers to a young inmate David Martin as Whip. When asked why, his response is “because you’re my whip card”. As it turns out later, Whip is the son of T-bag, a former inmate of Scofield, and plays a key role in the plot development, unbeknownst to anyone but Scofield. Michael’s nickname for Martin is thus carefully thought out. The Polish version translates “because you’re my whip card” as “bo jeste´s moim asem w r˛ekawie” {because you’re the ace up my sleeve}. Thus the “powerful, secret weapon” and “game of cards” metaphors are rendered, but the translation bears no reference to Whip, the name being left untranslated in the Polish version. Quite by chance, the next example, completely unrelated to the previous one, also deploys wordplay based on the lexeme “whip”. A visually (and sonically) salient element in The Weekend Vortex (The Big Bang Theory) is a smartphone app, which emits the sound of a whip when the smartphone is waved the way a real whip would be cracked. The characters use it in lieu of a verbal comment whenever they think that one of them is being pussy-whipped by their girlfriend. This is a case of nonverbal untranslatability, as there is no expression for “pussy-whipped” in Polish that would fit; one that would be semantically and stylistically suitable is “pod pantoflem” {under the slipper}, but the joke involving the characteristic movement and sound of whip-cracking would fall flat on the target audience. On hearing the smartphone-whip for the first time, Sheldon says “You’re right. I’m smart as a whip. I should be able to figure this out”. The Polish translation aptly uses another whip-related idiom: “Racja. Co´s wymy´sl˛e, bo nie ma na mnie bata”. {Right. I’ll think of something, as there is no whip on me4 }

4 This is a literal translation of a Polish idiom that means “I am the best”.

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In Colony, a high-ranking official fears a plot against him. His associate tries to put him at ease: “as far as I know, everybody up here is fully behind you”. To this, the official responds “with daggers in hand”. The Polish subtitle reads: “z tego, co wiem, to naprawd˛e / wszyscy tutaj w pełni ci˛e popieraj˛a. // Ze sztyletem w gar´sci”. {as far as I know everyone here fully supports you. With a dagger in hand} The wordplay falls flat on the Polish audience, as in Polish being “behind” only signifies physical position, not emotional support. Conspiracy is a film about the Wannsee conference in 1942, when senior Nazi officials met to come up with “the final solution to the Jewish question”. Adolf Eichmann, who is in charge of organising the meeting, tells his staff to “look smart”, translated as “wygl˛adajcie inteligentnie” {look intelligent}. “Smart” being a polysemous word, the wrong sense is chosen for the Polish translation. Eichmann is clearly referring to appearance, not intelligence, which is attestable by the visual context; everyone is either in uniform or elegant waiter garb. In the opening scene of Patriots Day, a character is being interrogated by the Boston police. In answer to the officer’s question as to why he is bleeding, he claims he has been hit with a “smoothie”. The officer’s confusion is cleared up a few lines down the script, when the character is asked for clarification and mimics ironing; clearly he means “pressing iron” when he says “smoothie”. The Polish subtitle renders the wordplay quite neatly, though the explanation is given in express terms instead of being hinted at via the visual channel: “uderzyła mnie pras˛a, tak˛a do prasowania ubran”. ´ {she hit me with a press, one for pressing clothes} (the Polish word for “press”, similarly to the English one, indicates either a device for applying physical pressure or newspapers/a newspaper). However, the Polish translation almost backfires when, in a much later scene, the officer says to the police chief (who was there during the interrogation scene) “How about I grab a smoothie and wait for you in the car?”. The vigilant Polish subtitler preserves the original wordplay: “moze ˙ kupi˛e sobie gazet˛e / i poczekam na pana w radiowozie” {maybe I’ll get a paper and wait for you in the car}. Ricky Gervais: Humanity, the British comedian’s stand-up programme, pokes fun at Caitlyn Jenner, a celebrity transgender woman, and formerly a male decathlete. In 2015, Jenner caused a multiple-vehicle collision and killed a female driver. Gervais’s jokes are centred round that incident, as well as her gender transition. The material for the gags comes from

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Gervais’s Twitter account. This is an added challenge, as the comedian mimics texting on a smartphone keyboard and quotes his tweets; the audience can thus gather that the one-liners are intentionally short, in line with Twitter’s space constraints. The first joke is Gervais’s reaction to Jenner’s comment that she should be the one hosting the Golden Globes. The Polish verb for “host” is “prowadzi´c”, as it happens, the Polish equivalent for “drive” is the same, which makes the following wordplay much easier to render: “Let her host. Just don’t let her drive”. In Polish: “A niech prowadzi. // Byle nie samochód” {Let her drive. Just not a car}. Later, Gervais mentions a newspaper which picked up on their feud: “Their headline was: ‘Caitlyn finally breaks silence over Ricky Gervais’. I sent back: ‘At last. She always brakes too late’”. In Polish: “Napisali: ‘Caitlyn w koncu ´ zabiera głos / w sprawie Ricky’ego Gervaisa’. Odpisałem: ‘Zabra´c to powinni / jej prawo jazdy’{They wrote: “Caitlyn finally speaks out in the matter of Ricky Gervais”. I wrote back: “What they should revoke is her licence to drive”}. This is a rare case where the translation improves on the original in that it sounds more natural. If Gervais’s retort is a tweet, the homophony and the resulting joke work better in speech than in writing. In Polish, the same verb is used for “speak out” and “revoke (licence)”, which makes the joke smooth and natural. In Game Night, three main characters are in a car chase, frantically discussing their options. The dialogue goes: “- Bulgarian’s got a ton of moles. - On his face? - No, in the police department”. The wordplay is based on the polysemy of the word “mole”, here: “blemish” or “spy”. The Polish translation goes: “Bułgar ma wtyczki // W domu? // Nie, w policji” {Bulgarian has plugs. At home? No, in the police.}. The Polish for a mole within an organisation is “wtyczka” (an electric plug), therefore no confusion with the face, as in the original, is likely; nonetheless, the translation achieves relevance. In Season 2 of The Sinner, a detective is interrogating a suspect, a young boy. To put him at ease, he casually asks about the boy’s sleeping habits. On hearing that he wakes up at sunrise, the detective says: “So, there is no sleeping in for this guy, huh?”. To this, the boy responds: “No, I sleep mostly inside, sometimes I sleep outside on warm nights”. Considering the wordplay relevant, the audiovisual translator has to seek a solution which would explain the misunderstood phrasal verb (“sleep in” as “sleep longer”, not “sleep inside”). The Polish version achieves

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the purpose: “Budzisz si˛e z kurami? // Nie, głównie s´pi˛e w domu. // Czasami na zewn˛atrz, gdy jest ciepło”. {You wake up with the chickens? No, I mostly sleep in the house. Sometimes outside, when it’s warm.} Translating intentional ambiguity and achieving the intended effect of humour or otherwise is usually an arduous task. Deciding on what is relevant and what may be forsaken under the visual, contextual and technical constraints is key.

5

Intertextuality

The theoretical foundations of intertextuality are explained in Chapter 4. In the case of audiovisual texts, intertextual references may come from other audiovisual texts, literature, religious texts or even products of popular culture like games or songs (though the latter are not exemplified in this section). In The Laundromat, a dark comedy about an insurance fraud and the world’s financial system in general, “the meek” are frequently mentioned, prominently in the intertitle announcing the first part of the movie, “The meek are screwed”. The Polish translation of the intertitle is “Ubodzy maj˛a przesrane” {The poor are screwed}. While reference to “the poor” makes every sense in the context of the movie, the English word “meek” simply has a different meaning. This is an intertextual reference, because the movie dialogue frequently recalls the famous quote from the Bible (“Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth”, Matthew 5:5). The default Polish Bible translation (Biblia Tysiaclecia) ˛ reads “Błogosławieni cisi, albowiem oni na własno´sc´ posi˛ad˛a ziemi˛e”. The subtitler may have confused that with “Błogosławieni ubodzy w duchu, albowiem do nich nalezy ˙ królestwo niebieskie”, which is Matthew 5:3, in English “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”. As biblical references are a prime example of what Newmark (1988) labels recognised translation, the translator of such an intertextually embedded fragment has very few liberties to take, as long as the reference is deemed relevant. Therefore the equivalent “cisi”, as per the Bible, would be a recommended solution. The multilingual structure of this example and, consequently, the audience’s associations is rather complex; while the Polish subtitle is clearly a translation of the English original, obviously, neither the King James Version nor Biblia Tysi˛aclecia is an original text; the Hebrew “‘anav”, in fact, stands for both “poor” and “meek”. The Gospel of Matthew, however, was written in Greek; the original “praus

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(πραε‹ς)” stands for “meek” and “gentle”. However, such a multilayered interpretation is arguably out of place in the present analysis, as the temporal (and therefore cognitive) constraints on processing (translated) filmic messages would render it quite unlikely in the actual context. In the film Gone girl, two characters are having a conversation at a bar about the marriage of one of them: “5 years? That came fast. And furious”. The Polish subtitle recognises the intertextual reference to The Fast and the Furious series of action films and makes use of the Polish title, which, fortunately, is the literal translation of the original one: “Szybko min˛eły. // I w´sciekle”. {They came fast. And furious} In many countries (including Germany, Spain and France) the movie franchise exists under the original English title. It would therefore be impossible for the audiovisual translator to retain the intertextual wordplay in this particular example. The Weekend Vortex is Episode 19 from Season 5 of The Big Bang Theory, released in March 2012. In one scene, the female protagonist Penny hears a knock on the door of her apartment and says to her boyfriend “Sorry, stallion. Your weird friend giraffe is here”. She is referring to Sheldon, one of the male protagonists, who is decidedly taller than his three closest male friends. The Polish subtitle is “Wybacz, ogierze. Przyszedł Melman” {Sorry, stallion. Melman has arrived}. Melman the giraffe is well known, not only to Polish viewers, from the Disney box-office animated hit Madagascar. The Opening Night Excitation, Episode 11 of Season 9 of The Big Bang Theory, begins with music from Star Wars and the words “A short time ago in an apartment in Pasadena”. This is a reference to the famous opening crawl of every Star Wars movie: “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away”. Given that Star Wars is frequently mentioned in the sitcom, the reference, reinforced by the soundtrack, should be instantly recognisable. The Polish subtitler decided to make recourse to the Polish translation of the famous quote from Star Wars (“Dawno, dawno temu w odległej galaktyce”) and render the opening as “Niedawno w nieodległej Pasedenie” {A short time ago in Pasadena not far away}. La casa de papel is a Spanish crime series, also known in the Englishspeaking world as Money Heist. In Season 3, Episode 4 of the series, a gang member code-named Denver taunts a hostage by making him guess the title of a movie, holding him at gunpoint. He eventually reveals that the movie he is thinking of is The Terminator; presently, he aims his gun at the terrified hostage and shoots him, saying “Sayonara, baby”. This is an

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intertextual reference to the famous scene where Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character shoots the Terminator robot and says (in the Spanish dubbed version) “Sayonara, baby”. In the original, Schwarzenegger says “Hasta la vista, baby”. The Spanish translator of The Terminator decided to highlight the use of a foreign language (as the original uses the Spanish phrase, the multilinguality would be obliterated in the Spanish version) and chose a rather well-known Japanese phrase of the same meaning. The Polish subtitler acknowledged the intertextual reference by translating Denver’s words as “Hasta la vista, baby”. In the third season of Stranger Things, characters are travelling to a hill, where a ham radio antenna is installed. The antenna will play a key role as a communication device in a battle that they are about to commence. They refer to the hill as Weathertop, a toponym from The Lord of the Rings, where a confrontation with the evil force (the Nazgûl) takes place. The Polish translation picks up the intertextual reference, translating Weathertop as Wichrowy Czub, just like in the film and the book. Stranger Things is set in the 1980s. In one scene of the third season, characters go to a cinema theatre and Back to the Future is on. A famous scene is shown, wherein Doc Brown demonstrates the time machine to Marty McFly; the time machine is a DeLorean vehicle, capable of time travel once it reaches the speed of 88 mph. In the scene shown on the cinema screen, Doc Brown has just managed to administer the firstever time jump; proud and elated, he yells to Marty: “What did I tell you? Eighty-eight miles per hour!”. Rendering what could be labelled as an embedded intertextual reference, the Polish subtitler needs to decide whether to adhere to the guidelines of good practice or observe the principle of relevance. The Polish timed text style guide provided by Netflix says: “measurements should be converted to the metric system, unless the original unit of measurement is plot-relevant”.5 The Polish subtitle makes the conversion: “Co ci mówiłem? // Sto czterdzie´sci na godzin˛e!” {What did I tell you? A hundred and forty an hour!”}. The conversion is approximate (88 miles equals precisely 141.62 kilometres), which would be acceptable if the figure merely indicated the car’s speed. However, the plot-relevance of the exact speed of the automobile, at which time travel begins, is significant. While to the characters of Stranger Things, Back to 5 https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/216787928-Polish-TimedText-Style-Guide, accessed on June 8, 2019.

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the Future is a premiere, the contemporary audience of the series consider it a cult movie. It is widely known, in Poland and arguably elsewhere, that the speed enabling time travel is precisely 88 mph, not 140 kph, therefore the Polish subtitle is somewhat confusing and requires extra processing effort. This example is a rare case of the translation brief (Nord 1997 and elsewhere) trumping the quest for relevance and equivalence. The Netflix comedy series After Life tells the story of Tony, head of feature stories at a small-town newspaper. A local by the name of Brian desperately wants to make the headline, but struggles to find a story that would be of interest. Eventually, a feature is published on the front page under the title “Life of Brian”. The Polish subtitler picked up the intertextual reference to Monty Python’s Life of Brian and rendered the headline ˙ as “Zywot Briana”. This is ostensibly against the principle of relevance and subtitling code of good practice, as the default (and therefore most ˙ accessible cognitively) Polish version would be “Zycie Briana” (zywot ˙ is a dated word, befitting the story of Jesus Christ, but much less a contemporary small town in the UK). However, the subtitle of the headline is identical with the Polish title of Monty Python’s classic. Therefore, the extra processing effort is offset by extra benefits. Translating an intertextual reference is often more constrained than processing it in the original. A character in the cyberpunk series Altered Carbon is a (virtual) hotel proprietor by the name of Poe. The hotel itself is called The Raven. The reference to Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous poem is clear. The artificial intelligence Poe, played by Chris Conner, even bears some physical semblance to the American poet. In Season Two, Poe returns as the proprietor of The Nevermore Hotel; again, the reference is apparent. The Polish subtitler picks up the intertextual reference. However, in order to preserve it in Season Two, a relevant decision needs to be made, which was not necessary in the case of the original. There are seven Polish translations of the poem (cf. Studniarz 2011). All of them bear the same title (“Kruk”), therefore labelling the hotel “Kruk” is relevant, as it brings about similar contextual effects to those that the original name generates; the Polish audience are likely to make the cognitive connection between Poe, “Kruk”, and the nineteenthcentury poem. However, “The Nevermore Hotel” poses a greater problem, as the key phrase in the poem is not translated in the same fashion by all of the seven translators. The translations of “Nevermore” are, respectively, “Kres i krach” (S. Baranczak), ´ “Nigdy wi˛ecej” (W. J.

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Kasinski, ´ K. Jaskuła and J. Kozak6 ), “Prózny ˙ trud” (M. Fronski), ´ and “Nigdy juz” ˙ (Z. Przesmycki and B. Beaupré). The subtitler opted for the last version. Statistically, “Nigdy wi˛ecej” was used by more Polish translators (three), but “Nigdy juz” ˙ seems relevant in its markedness. As the intertextual reference is short and, therefore, easy to overlook, the latter rendition is more likely to trigger the positive cognitive effect than the former; “nigdy juz” ˙ would be unlikely as a default, decontextualised translation of “never more” (unlike “nigdy wi˛ecej”), therefore the ostension geared at the target audience is that there must be more to it than just a literal translation. Additionally, both translators (Przesmycki and Beaupré) died over 70 years ago, therefore their work is no longer subject to copyright and has entered the public domain.7

6

Inflectionality

This category is language-specific, though not limited to the English— Polish language pair. Translating from a non-inflected language into an inflected one, the translator has to decide on an appropriate verb form, gender, etc. This constraint may result in translation errors or correct decisions of a pre-emptive nature, for example revealing plot-pertinent information concealed in the original. In the series Prison Break, a character tells the story of a famous prison escape effected by a P. B. Cooper, who is now (at the time of telling the story) known as Charles Westmoreland. The original dialogue is “Cooper, Westmoreland, jumped out of the plane with five million dollars” The Polish subtitle reads “Cooper, Westmoreland, / wyskoczyli z samolotu z 5 milionami” {Cooper, Westmoreland, [they] jumped out of the plane with five millions”}. Aside from the second comma in the first line being quite unnecessary, the subtitle suggests that Cooper and Westmoreland are two different characters, who both jumped out of the plane. If English were an inflected language, the verb form might suggest the correct approach to the subtitle. Conversely, were Polish a non-inflected language, the error might well go overlooked by the audience. 6 The last translation uses a loan word (“Nevermore”) and “Nigdy wi˛ecej” interchangeably. 7 I am indebted to my colleagues from the Institute of English Studies, University of Łód´z - prof. Kacper Bartczak, prof. Mikołaj Deckert and dr Magdalena Cie´slak, for their insightful comments on this intertextual reference in Altered Carbon.

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Mindhunter is set in the 1970s and describes the birth of the FBI method of profiling. The protagonists interview serial killers to learn their methods in order to prevent similar crimes. In Season 2, Episode 5, they investigate the Manson Family. One scene depicts Holden Ford, an FBI agent, displaying mugshots of the Family members (but not Charles Manson) to his team and characterising each criminal. Apart from Manson himself, only one of the five members—Tex Watson—is male. Ford lays out the mugshots one by one (Atkins, Kasabian, Krenwinkel and Brunner - all young females) and proceeds to briefly characterise each girl. Quite logically, the Polish subtitles use feminine grammatical forms. Eventually, Ford produces the last mugshot, that of a bearded young man, and says: “And Tex Watson, 24, honor student, school paper editor, athlete”. Oddly, this is subtitled as: “I Tex Watson, lat 24. // Prymuska, / redaktorka gazety szkolnej, sportowiec” {And Tex Watson, aged 24. [she] best student, school paper editor, athlete}. The Polish translation is clearly referring to Watson as if he, like the previous four members, were female. Tex could theoretically be a woman’s name; still, this is in stark contrast to the visually transmitted information (the picture of a bearded character). Moreover, world knowledge should have helped the subtitler avoid the blatant error; Tex Watson is not a fictional character and is relatively well known even outside the US, at least to anyone remotely interested in the Manson Family, the general awareness being recently rekindled by the 50th anniversary of the Tate murders and the release of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (both aired in 2019, coinciding with Season 2 of Mindhunter). In Season 9, Episode 23 of The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon hires Stuart to go shopping with Amy instead of him; Amy gets offended and hires Stuart to argue with Sheldon in her stead. Stuart comes up to Sheldon and says “Sheldon, you are the most inconsiderate person I have ever met in my entire life”. As it turns out later, he is not speaking for himself, but merely repeating Amy’s words to Sheldon, which she commissioned him to do. The humour is partially untranslatable into an inflected language, as the verb form will make it clear whether it’s a male or female speaker. Thus, the Polish subtitle is: “Jeste´s najbardziej nieczułym człowiekiem, / jakiego poznałam”. {You are the most insensitive person I (feminine) have met”. The feminine verb form looks odd, seeing as the speaker is Stuart. In the final episode of Season 2 of Ozark, the female protagonist, a mother of two, is entertaining a house guest. She explains to the visitor

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that the rest of the family are not in: “Marty’s already gone and Charlotte was spending the night at a friend’s”. The 15-year-old daughter Charlotte plans on getting emancipated from her parents and is living with a boyfriend, which the mother does not want the visitor to know. While a sleepover at a female friend’s is perfectly normal for a teenager, a 15year-old girl spending the night with a male friend is likely to raise some eyebrows. The English “friend” is gender-neutral and therefore perfectly safe. Due to the grammatical gender of the Polish language, the subtitler, wishing to stay true to the mimesis, has no choice but to reveal the gender of the friend: “Marty juz˙ wyszedł, // a Charlotte została na noc u kolegi” {Marty has already left, while Charlotte stayed the night at a male friend’s}. In order to fully appreciate the following example, a contextual introduction is in order. Bates Motel is a series intended as a prequel to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Hitchcock’s classic tells the story of one Norman Bates, the proprietor of Bates Motel, a serial killer obsessed with his mother. The series is set in the twenty-first century, but Norman is 17, while his mother Norma is in her 40s; they run the establishment together. Norma has a profound influence over her son; as she herself says, they are “two parts of the same person”. As a result, Norman occasionally gets blackouts; he visualises his mother telling him she has been wronged by someone, which prompts him to kill that person; afterwards, he has no recollection of the murder. In Season 2, Episode 4, Norman learns that his uncle Caleb, who is in town, sexually abused his mother when she was 13. Norman visits Caleb at his hotel room; prior to that, Caleb was unaware of Norman’s existence. The boy has one of his blackouts, preceded by memory flashes of his mother being raped. In a trance, he begins to speak, or more precisely his mother is speaking through him in his own voice: “I came here to tell you that I remember what you did to me. […] I was too young. […] I never did anything to you. […] You raped me. Over and over. I was your little sister, I loved you”. It is only towards the end of this exchange that the flabbergasted Caleb begins to comprehend that his nephew is relating Norma’s experiences, not his own. The original audience are aware of Norman’s troubled state of mind, but prior to the hotel room scene, the boy had never spoken out as his mother. Thus, there is a moment of suspense before the viewers realise that it is in fact Norma who is speaking, not Norman.

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Translating Norma’s (Norman’s) accusation into an inflected language where gender agreement is required (such as Polish) breaks this suspense. As early as the first word, the translator needs to decide whether to use masculine or feminine, thereby revealing whether the actual speaker is Norma or Norman. Were the translator to use the masculine form, the communicative intention would be lost with the foreign (in this case Polish) audience, eventually rendering the sentence “I was your little sister” nonsensical. The lesser evil, therefore, is to use the feminine, thereby immediately disclosing Norman’s state of mind. This wreaks havoc with the filmmakers’ intentionally gradual introduction of Norman as a mentally unstable murderer, who acts unconsciously, under imagined encouragement by his mother. On the other hand, most viewers of Bates Motel will have been familiar with Psycho, number 8 on the BBC’s list of 100 greatest American movies of all time.8 As the events of Psycho postdate those of Bates Motel, Norman’s deranged personality is already known to the audience. This is an intertextual factor, which the audiovisual translator should be aware of. The Polish subtitles go as follows: “Przyszłam ci powiedzie´c // ze ˙ pami˛etam, co mi robiłe´s. […] Byłam zbyt młoda. […] Nigdy nic ci nie zrobiłem. […] Gwałciłe´s mnie. // Raz za razem. // Byłam twoj˛a młodsz˛a siostr˛a, kochałam ci˛e”. {I came to tell you that I remember what you did to me. I [feminine] was too young. I never did anything to you. You raped me. Time and again. I [feminine] was your younger sister, I [feminine] loved you}. As his mental issues become increasingly severe, Norman impersonates his mother by wearing her clothes and copying her behaviour. In Season 4, Episode 1, wearing his mother’s housecoat in her absence, he opens the door to their house to greet a visitor. The visitor is somewhat baffled at Norman’s attire, to which he calmly responds “You caught me getting ready”. The Polish translation uses the masculine verb form: “Wła´snie si˛e ubierałem” {I was just getting ready}, though the broad situational context, in particular the previously described scene from Season 2, Episode 4, might suggest that the feminine form might not be out of place. However, nowhere else in the scene does Norman indicate to the visitor that he is his own mother. The subtitler must have concluded that

8 https://www.indiewire.com/2015/07/critics-pick-the-100-greatest-american-moviesof-all-time-for-the-bbc-130672/, accessed on April 29, 2019.

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the cognitive effort required to comprehend the dynamics of the scene will be lower if the masculine verb form is used. Eventually, Norman is diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder. In therapy, he often speaks out as his mother. At this stage of his mental illness, the transformation is clearly visible in his body language. The Polish subtitler consistently uses the feminine verb form in these scenes, working on the assumption that the audience are by now familiar with Norman’s condition and the discord between the speaker’s apparent gender (male) and the verb form (feminine) causes little (if any) increase in cognitive effort. The French series La Forêt tells the story of three missing teenage girls. A character receives a series of text messages from an unknown sender. The messages are accusatory and threaten to reveal the recipient’s secret, which the audience are oblivious to at that point. French and Polish are both V languages. In sociolinguistics, a V language is one which distinguishes between a formal and an informal/neutral form of address; a T language does not (like English, where “thou” is now archaic, except for religious contexts). In addition, when a V language also happens to be an inflected one, many markers are used to distinguish a formal address from an informal one. The difference between French and Polish in this respect is that while the French “vous” applies both to male and female addresses, Polish uses two different forms of address. Grammatically, the Polish translation of “Qu’est ce que vous voulez?” would necessitate a decision whether to use a male or female form; however, the male character who writes this in response to his mysterious interlocutor’s intimidating texts is unaware what gender they are. The Polish subtitler decides to forgo formality and use the informal (T) variant, thus eschewing the problem (“czego chcesz” {what do you want} is gender-neutral). The Polish title of the series The Sinner is “Grzesznica” {“sinner”, feminine form}. The protagonist is a young woman who commits murder. However, Season 2 is about a completely different character, a young boy, also charged with murder. For this reason, Netflix has decided to revert to the original title, as the Polish translation would be out of place given the feminine form. This paratextual problem would be insignificant if the target language had no grammatical gender. As exemplified above, AVT from a non-inflected language into an inflected one (alternatively, from a T language into a V one) necessitates making contextually motivated decisions that would not have to be made (or would be far simpler to make) if the source and target languages were

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of the same type. As in the case of the other types of problems presented in this chapter, the right choices are typically trade-offs between adequacy and acceptability, with relevance as the key condition.

7

Multilinguality

The term multilinguality is used throughout this work, after Bogucki (2019), to refer to the feature of filmic mimesis whereby characters speak different languages, just like in real life. Literature on AVT seems to prefer the term multilingualism (cf. Díaz-Cintas 2011; de Higes Andino 2014; Badstübner-Kizik 2017); however, to avoid confusion with second language acquisition, a separate notion is proposed here. The distinction is deliberate; multilingualism is a natural concomitant of the globalised world, whereas multilinguality is an aesthetic device on the part of the filmmakers introduced for a number of reasons, for instance to indicate Otherness (Bogucki 2019: 80). In general, audiovisual texts may contain fragments in languages other than the main one; for example, an English-language movie might have scenes where characters speak Italian, Spanish, the Black Speech or Arquillian. Thus, they may be identified as “Other”—strangers or aliens in sci-fi—or they may simply be using foreign languages for the same reasons we all do in real life. The difference between reality and filmic mimesis is that, in the latter, foreign language is always used deliberately, whereas in the case of the former it may be a last-resort solution (e.g. attempting to communicate with foreigners not speaking their language); there are relevance-theoretic implications of this distinction. As a rule of thumb, characters’ utterances in other languages tend to be translated in the foreign language version if they are translated in the original version in the first place. For example, a sentence in French in an English-language film is rendered into Polish together with the English dialogue if the director deems its meaning relevant to plot development and translates it into English for the original audience. Conversely, if a character speaks Japanese in an English-language movie and there is no translation into English provided, the director’s intention (or, to use a relevance-theoretic term, ostension) is usually merely to indicate the character’s otherness and inability/unwillingness to communicate with the other characters; thus it does not matter what the character is saying, it matters that they are not sharing the same linguistic code with the others. There is also the pragmatic dimension; faced with an utterance in Japanese and intending

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to provide a translation, the audiovisual translator from English would have to expend additional effort in order to arrive at the meaning of the utterance, a trouble they would not have to go to if the utterance were translated into English in the first place. Disturbia is a thriller about a teenager under house arrest for assaulting a teacher; the boy (rightly) suspects his neighbour of being a serial killer. The neighbour is invited to his place by his mum, who is unaware of her son’s suspicions. Mr Turner is curious about the boy’s ankle monitor, but Kale won’t show it to him. Julie wants to pacify the tension between her guest and her son by being a good hostess. The dialogue is rapid, as Julie and Turner speak almost simultaneously: “(Turner, to Kale): So what did you do? (Julie, to Turner): How do you like your coffee?” The Polish subtitles are curtailed, mindful of the cognitive effort necessary to process such fast paced dialogue: “- Za co? / - Co do kawy?” {What for? Coffee with what?}. Before Turner manages to respond, Kale cuts in, angrily: “I popped my Spanish teacher”. The Polish subtitle is literal: “Waln˛ałem nauczyciela hiszpanskiego” ´ {I hit my Spanish teacher}. After a short pause, Turner responds, slowly and with a bit of an effort: “Cafe con leche. Por favor”. The Polish subtitle offers a translation out of Spanish: “Kawa z mlekiem. Bardzo prosz˛e” {Coffee with milk. Please.}. Julie smiles pleasantly and proceeds to make the beverage. In terms of relevance, the Polish translation of the Spanish utterance is questionable. The killer appears to want to break the tension and impress the attractive mother, succeeding on both grounds. The Spanish sentence is an instance of caretaker speech, contextually understandable by anyone with a smattering of linguistic sensitivity, even with practically no knowledge of Spanish. The cognitive effort is minimal, yet still lessened for the sake of the Polish audience; on the other hand, the Polish viewer has to reallocate attention to read the arguably unnecessary subtitle instead of perhaps concentrating on the acting in the tension-filled scene. In the third season of Stranger Things, a police officer is interrogating a Russian scientist, with another character interpreting between English and Russian. The English translations are subtitled into Polish; however, strangely, so were the original Russian responses. Thus, the Polish audience received redundant subtitles. The past tense is purposeful; the example was sourced shortly after Stranger Things 3 premiered in Poland (July 2019), but the Polish subtitles currently (November 2019) available on Netflix do not render the original Russian responses, just the English translations by the character interpreter. This is indicative of current

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AVT practices in more ways than one. Firstly, multiple language versions of eagerly awaited releases need to be prepared on a tight schedule, which may result in inaccuracies and ill-conceived solutions. Secondly, unlike chemical or laser methods, digital subtitling permits effortless post-production adjustments. Thirdly, and most importantly from the perspective of the present work, the practice of subtitling seems to intuitively follow the logic of relevance (translate only what is necessary), even if improvements to this end are retrofitted. Multilinguality may also be manifested through the visual semiotic channels. A female character in John Wick 2 is mute and communicates exclusively in sign language. Her interjections, however few, are deemed relevant to the extent that they get translated by means of subtitles. The titular character in the John Wick trilogy has a Latin tattoo on his back, which says “Fortis fortuna adiuvat”. The inscription is visible a couple of times in both the first movie and the sequel. However, unlike in John Wick, in the sequel the inscription receives a transla´ tion in the form of a subtitle in block capitals: “SZCZE˛ SCIE SPRZYJA ˙ ODWAZNYM” {Fortune favours the brave}—see also the section on paratextual consistency below.

8

Paratextual Consistency

The translation problem described in this section is particularly pertinent in the age of collaborative translation work. As indicated in Chapter 4, it is common to assign translations of different paratexts to different translators. As long as there is actual collaboration, there is also consistency across all the texts. However, more often than not, the translators do not consult each others’ work, particularly if done as separate assignments. As a result, a dialogue line in the trailer of a movie may be translated quite differently from the exact same line in the actual movie, as the trailer and the film itself were translated by two different translators, who never conferred with each other. The trailer and the movie may be considered as two separate audiovisual texts in that their distribution (release) may be spatially and temporally independent, but they are certainly connected, as the former serves as an advertisement for the latter. For this reason, a viewer familiar with only one of the texts will be oblivious of the clash, but another viewer, who has seen both, will be put to unnecessary cognitive effort not offset by any extra benefits. A similar logic applies to other audiovisual paratexts, such as sequels.

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John Wick 2 is precisely a case of lack of consistency in translating sequels. In both parts of the movie, the titular hitman John Wick is nicknamed Boogeyman, presumably due to his ability to induce fear in his targets. In the Polish version of the trilogy’s first instalment, the nickname is not translated and therefore the fear-inducing sense is lost with the audience. In John Wick 2, “Boogeyman” is rendered as “Widmo”, which is a decidedly better solution than borrowing in terms of comprehension (rendering the threat), but not as felicitous in terms of consistency. An interesting case of subtitling background dialogue can be seen in Season 4, Episode 1 of Bates Motel. Norman is in a psychiatric hospital, reminiscing about happy moments from his childhood. His mother is teaching him to play the piano; the melody is Mr Sandman by The Chordettes. The tune is easily recognisable, especially as it had already been used in an earlier episode. The first line (“Mr Sandman, bring me a dream”) is barely heard, blending into the music and the laughter of both Norma and Norman. However, the subtitler decided to translate it as “Panie Sandman, ze´slij mi marzenie” {Mr Sandman, send me a dream}, evidently violating Netflix guidelines for subtitlers, which specify that background dialogue should only be translated if plot pertinent.9 Incidentally, the first time the song is used in the series (Season 2, Episode 2), the Polish translation is completely different: “Piaskowy dziadku // niech w moich snach” {Sand grandpa, may my dreams}. The anthroponym is not only translated quite literally, but the translation brings to mind the title of an East German cartoon (Unser Sandmännchen), broadcast in Poland as Piaskowy dziadek between the 1970s and 1990s. This evidences Netflix’s policy of assigning different episodes of the same series to different translators, who are not necessarily familiar with each other’s work, which results in inconsistencies across seasons and thereby increased cognitive effort for the audience.

9

Language Variety

Language variety, whether use-related (e.g. register) or user-related (e.g. dialect) poses a significant translation problem to which there is no uniform solution, as no particular strategy can universally be deployed across all text types and skopoi. However, whatever the translation type, 9 https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/216787928-Polish-TimedText-Style-Guide, accessed on May 3, 2019.

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Relevance Theory can be of considerable help in tackling instances of rendering language variety. Each occurrence of marked language triggers the translator’s decision whether to render it as marked or unmarked (standard) language; only if the former is chosen, does the translator decide what language variety would be appropriate. For example, dialect can be translated as standard (dialectally neutral) language, an existing target language dialect or an artificial idiolect posing as a target language dialectal variety (cf. Berezowski 1997). The use of marked language would be interpreted as extra cognitive effort within the framework of Relevance Theory; as such, it is encouraged only when extra benefits can be obtained. The plot of The Big Lebowski is based on the confusion of Jeffrey Lebowski, a poor, lazy “beach bum”, known as The Dude, and Jeffrey Lebowski, a handicapped millionaire. When the two Lebowskis meet for the first time, the striking social gap between them is depicted not only by their looks (the millionaire in an expensive suit and tie, the bum in a dirty T-shirt and hoodie), but also in their language. The Dude comes to see the millionaire hoping to receive compensation for his carpet, which was urinated upon by two thugs who thought they had come for the rich Lebowski. The verb used by the Dude is “piss”, but the millionaire uses much more sophisticated language: “Did I urinate on your rug?” “Every time a rug is micturated upon in this fair city I have to compensate the person?” The high register is not rendered as such in the Polish subtitles: “Czy ja panu nasikałem na dywan?” “Czy zawsze, gdy kto´s zleje si˛e / w tym mie´scie na dywan // musz˛e pokrywa´c straty?” {Did I piss on your rug? Every time someone pees on a rug in this city I need to cover the losses?} A frequently researched topic, closely related to language variety, is profanity.10 Designated Survivor is a political thriller/drama TV series, formerly (for the first two seasons) aired on ABC, currently (as of 2019) in Season Three on Netflix. The broadcaster shift is significant in that, as of Season Three, the parental guidelines (content rating system) have changed from TV-14 to TV-MA, effectively rendering the series viewable by adults only. This is instantly noticeable11 not only in the content (sex 10 The minute distinctions between profanity, taboo language, vulgar language, swear words, etc. fall beyond the scope of the present work. 11 Compare viewers’ feedback on the Internet Movie Database, https://www.imdb. com/title/tt5296406/parentalguide?ref_=tt_stry_pg, accessed on June 10, 2019.

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and nudity, some frightening and intense scenes, complex social issues raised), but predominantly in terms of profanity. The way the vulgar language is introduced appears deliberate; every time a character uses a rude word, another one makes a comment, as if the scriptwriters wanted to highlight the inappropriate language. In the exchange between Tom Kirkman, President of the USA and his 11-year-old daughter, the girl says “shitty”, to which the father responds “Penelope Kirkman, your mother would have washed your mouth out with soap”. In the Polish translation, the harsh language seems even harsher than in the original version, though of course such an observation is methodologically challenging to prove. In one scene, POTUS makes an impromptu address during a rally and says “I don’t know if you’ve heard but I had my ass handed to me today”. While the language is not exactly taboo, the President would certainly be ill-advised to use it in an address. The Polish subtitle is “Nie wiem, czy słyszeli´scie, / ale dzi´s skopali mi dup˛e”. {I don’t know if you heard, but they kicked my ass today} The translation, while not cringingly vulgar, could have been made far less informal. Interestingly, the same expression is used later on in another episode of the same season, this time spoken to the president by a member of his staff: “You really handed Moss his ass on a platter, if I may be so bold”. The Polish subtitle is far gentler than in the example above: “Rozłozył ˙ pan Mossa na łopatki, // je´sli mog˛e tak to uj˛ac´ ” {You pinned Moss down, if I may put it like that}. In The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann (more about this documentary in Sect. 15 below), a headline shown as text on screen, in block capitals, reads: MADDIE CASE SLEUTH DEAD. “Sleuth” is a literary word, but it’s not dated and certainly not slang. The Polish translation reads “Glizda od sprawy Maddie martwy” {Earthworm from Maddie’s case dead}. This is a very bizarre choice, since “glizda” is a colloquial term for “earthworm” (sometimes used in the sense of “a slimy person”) and there is no evidence to suggest that it is a slang / jargon expression referring to a detective. However, this may well be a typo, because the colloquial expression for a policeman in Polish is “glina” (lit. “clay”), very similar in form to “glizda”. The title of the first episode is The beneath truth; it’s ungrammatical, since the correct word order would have been “the truth beneath”. The Polish translation (Ukryta prawda—“Hidden truth”) does not indicate the substandard language. As it turns out, the nonstandard word order is lifted from a comment from a Portuguese journalist who frequently

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appears in this episode as well as the others. Sandra Felgueiras speaks communicative English, which is, however, accented and not error-free.

10

Forms of Address

Depending on a number of factors, in particular the language pair in question, rendering forms of address in AVT may be a minor issue or a major one. Most guidelines for audiovisual translators agree that characters’ names may be removed in the target language version, more frequently when they are addressed on screen than off-screen; the situational context and the visual semiotic channel make them irrelevant in translation. However, a more vexing problem is which form of address is appropriate, as they are not always directly transferable from one language to another (for instance, in the English language it is common for parents to scold their children by using their full names, as in “James Smithson, you are in for a lot of trouble now”; a direct translation into another language would rarely work). Moreover, rendering forms of address becomes a truly thorny issue when translating out of a T language into a V one (compare Sect. 6 above). Let us consider an example to illustrate this. In Season 1, Episode 4 of Hinterland, DCI Tom Mathias is working on a murder case. The victim is a female student. Mathias interrogates the victim’s mother, Gwen, who eventually becomes his love interest. One day, Gwen visits him at the police station. On seeing her, Mathias says “Gwen”. The Polish subtitle is “Pani Gwen”. This (Mr/Ms plus first name) is a common form of address in semi-formal settings in Poland. Though at that point merely acquaintances, Mathias and Gwen shortly fall for each other. After a lovemaking scene, their dialogue—though technically an official interrogation - uses informal forms of address in the Polish translation: “Were there any other men in your daughter’s life, besides your husband?” rendered as “Czy w zyciu ˙ twojej córki byli / inni m˛ezczy´ ˙ zni, poza twoim m˛ezem?”. ˙ The formal version would have been: “Czy w zyciu ˙ pani córki byli / inni m˛ezczy´ ˙ zni, poza pani m˛ezem?” ˙ In the original dialogue alone, there is nothing to suggest that the relationship between Mathias and Gwen changes in any way between their meeting at the police station and making love; in fact, grammatically speaking, the dialogue between them appears to be on the same level of formality throughout the entire episode, from meeting for the first time to becoming romantically involved. The only way for the audience to tell that they are becoming more intimate is through the plot and the

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visual semiotic channel—gestures, facial expressions, longer looks. The Polish subtitler, however, needs to assess which address form and verb form is appropriate in each scene by gauging the relevance of the plot development and the visual setting. The short dialogue line from Conspiracy (see Sect. 4 above for a brief plot description), “He speaks Jewish”, exhibits two translation problems in merely three words. The English dialogue uses deixis (“he”) and refers to “Jewish” language—an adjective that Nazi officers would certainly use, as the meeting depicted in the movie is dedicated to resolving the Jewish question. The translation seems more accurate than the original. The pronoun changes into the actual name of one of the characters, while the adjective becomes more specific and accurate (“Hebrew” instead of “Jewish”): “Eichmann zna hebrajski” {Eichmann knows Hebrew}. The translational decision whether to opt for deixis or addressing the character directly is conditioned by the situational and visual context, for instance whether the character addressed is on-screen or off-screen. Throughout the movie, Nazi officers’ ranks are consistently foreignised. “General Heydrich” is translated as “Gruppenführer Heydrich”, while “major” becomes “Sturmbannführer”. Ostensibly, such choices flout the principle of relevance. “General” and “major” are almost identical to their Polish equivalents, at the same time being considerably shorter than the German counterparts. The use of German diacritics (ü) is a potential technical issue, in case the character is misrendered by the subtitle software. The arguments for the use of the German ranks are accuracy and target audience convention; Polish audiences are quite familiar with Nazi military ranks, as there has been a plethora of films and series about WW2 on Polish television. The Polish translation of Bates Motel uses the vocative case for anthroponyms (Normanie, Dylanie, etc.). This seems marked, dated, and decidedly out of place in some situations (Norman, apprehended and kept in a hot box in a field, would certainly not use “Dylanie” yelling out for his brother; “Dylan” would be the default option). There are quite a few dynamic scenes where characters get intensely emotional; the use of the vocative in the Polish diegesis strikes the viewer as odd. However, it appears to be an extension of the rather bizarre convention whereby Norman keeps addressing Norma as “mother”, which is commented on several times in the dialogue (see Sect. 6 above for a description of Norman’s peculiar relationship with his mother).

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Condensation

This section refers to a subtitling technique discussed in Gottlieb (1998) and Bogucki (2004). While a detailed analysis of subtitling techniques is outside the scope of the present work, condensation remains at the core of subtitling practice due to the nature of constraints typically operating in this mode of AVT. Subtitling software is increasingly more liberal when it comes to the number of characters per line, as per recent guidelines supplied by streaming services and other providers of audiovisual products, but, as a rule of thumb, subtitles continue to be curtailed compared to the original dialogue. A Nazi officer in Conspiracy is giving statistics regarding Jews in the Soviet union: “5 million Russo-European Jews 10% agriculture, 15% of them workers, tradesmen almost 20%, bureaucrats almost 24%, doctors, writers, journalists, actors and so on almost 33%”. The Polish subtitle is heavily condensed, but at the same time grossly inaccurate: “z pi˛eciu mln. ˙ Zydów w ZSRR / 10% to rolnicy, 15% robotnicy // 20% pracownicy biurowi, 25% lekarze, pisarze i dziennikarze {out of five mln Jews in the USSR 10% are farmers, 15% workers, 20% office clerks, 25% doctors, writers and journalists}. Further on in the example, the condensation continues: “They are arrogant and self-obsessed and calculating and reject the Christ and I will not have them pollute the German blood”; rendered as: “A s˛a aroganccy, / nie wierz˛a w Chrystusa” {and they are arrogant, they don’t believe in Christ}. Heavily condensed subtitles run the risk of being inaccurate or incomplete in conveying intended information. In the example below from Prison Break, Sara, an auxiliary in the titular prison break, is referring to an escaped convict who is dangerous to the public: “Really? I mean did you even know about the other guys, did you know that I would be putting T-bag back onto the street?” The Polish subtitle glosses over this fact, focusing on the most relevant information, namely that Sara was not only assisting her lover in the escape, but also several other prisoners: “Naprawd˛e? Wiedziałe´s, / ze ˙ inni tez˙ chc˛a uciec?” {Really? Did you know that the others also want to escape?} Condensation may be the single area where the quest for relevance is key in subtitling quality assessment. Since (as indicated in Chapter 3) subtitling is constrained by its nature and aims to be as short and simple as possible, condensation comes in handy as an instinctive solution. However

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convenient it may be, it is not always optimal, unless filtered by relevance. The practice of subtitling often comes down to demarcating what can safely be “lost in translation”, the resulting rendition still relevant and therefore acceptable.

12

Anachronisms

In film, just like in literature or theatre, diegesis and mimesis represent a particular spatial and temporal context, not necessarily concurrent with reality. The world of fiction allows the viewer/reader to become immersed in life on Mars in the twenty-fifth century, as well as life in China in the twelfth century. For the immersion to be successful, the realia should be credible. Sometimes an anachronism slips through, however, usually quickly spotted by film buffs. The decisions of the translator (be they audiovisual, literary or otherwise) will depend to a certain extent on the strategy adopted, in particular the dichotomy of foreignisation vs. domestication (Venuti 1995 and elsewhere). Domestication allows more freedom in adjusting the temporal and spatial parameters; the idea of “bringing the writer to the reader” (Schleiermacher 1813/2004) means that domestication results in a target text that is as accessible to the reader as possible, even at the cost of manipulating the original. Strategies of AVT, in turn, are mode-dependent. Domestication is usually discouraged in subtitling, which is an instance of overt translation (the original is accessible at all times; cf. the dichotomy of overt vs. covert translation in House 1977), but may be preferred in dubbing. In general, visual anachronisms in film (period-incorrect attire, setting, etc.) remain as evidence of imperfect filmmaking, but verbal anachronisms may be corrected in translation if such a correction is in line with the strategy chosen and in particular the overall paradigm of relevance. On the other hand, an anachronism may also be a translation error, as evidenced in some of the examples below. Although Kong: Skull Island takes place in the early 1970s, one character is referred to as a “data wrangler”, a positively twenty-first-century job title; one of the earliest recorded uses of this expression was in a 2001 press article.12 The Polish translation is “specjalista od plików” {file specialist}, which rather successfully eschews the period-correctness issue. The expression, just like the English one, clearly suggests a modern-day 12 https://www.multichannel.com/news/behind-headlines-revamped-news-158891, accessed on January 7, 2019.

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computer geek, but could theoretically have been used in the 1970s (after all, a file does not have to be electronic). Mindhunter is also set in the 1970s and describes the birth of the FBI method of profiling. Episode 6 of the second season contains a translation anachronism. An interviewed murderer describes one of his crimes, saying “we were all fucked up at the time”. The translation is “byli´smy wtedy zjarani” {we were blazed back then}. While the English vulgarism could easily have been used in the twentieth century, the Polish translation sounds decidedly modern. Similarly, the colloquial language in the Polish translation of Dolemite is my name is not period-correct. Like the two examples above, this movie is set in the 1970s, whereas such Polish colloquialisms as “Chillujemy sobie na grillu” {we’re chilling at a barbecue} for the original “We’re having a pleasant barbecue” or “My´slałe´s, ze ˙ podbijesz i si˛e dogadamy?” {You thought you’d chum up and we’d make a deal?} for the original “You just thought you was gonna walk up in here and make a deal, huh?” sound contemporary in Polish. The thorny issue of translating language variety is tackled separately in Sect. 9 above. Operation Argo is an historical drama about a rescue operation set in 1979. A character comments on Ben Affleck’s character’s attire: “I was expecting more of a G-man look”, to which the response is: “I think you’re thinking of the FBI, sir”. Affleck’s character is wearing a tweed coat and flannel shirt, carrying a messenger bag. “G-man” is short for “government man” and refers to a special agent of a law enforcement agency such as the FBI. The Polish subtitle reads “spodziewałem si˛e faceta w czerni” {I was expecting a man in black}. The intertextual reference to Men in black is an anachronism, as the first movie in Barry Sonnenfeld’s trilogy came out in 1997, 18 years after the events of Operation Argo took place. On balance, relevance-driven decisions in the case of the translation problem described in this section are heavily contextualised; the temporal context dictates the suitability of a particular solution.

13

Redundancy

Redundancy is a common flaw of a technical nature, which fits within the paradigm of relevance rather well. Each subtitle requires a cognitive effort on the part of the audience; it diverts the viewer from the picture (as evidenced by frequent eye tracking studies, see e.g. Kruger et al. 2015)

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and requires mental processing to comprehend. A subtitle that is redundant means unnecessary processing effort on the part of the audience. Whether a subtitle is redundant or not depends on whether comprehension of the respective line of dialogue, enhanced by visual clues, would take place were the subtitle never there in the first place. The title of the movie Sully (cf. Sects. 3 and 4) comes from the nickname given to Chesley Sullenberger, a commercial aircraft pilot famous for saving 155 passengers from an imminent crash by landing on the river Hudson. This is a true story, arguably more or less familiar to the audiences. The Polish subtitles available on Netflix make a common overtranslation mistake; from the point of view of comprehension, it is not necessary to include a subtitle that is identical to the movie’s title, which is prominently displayed on the screen in the original. The Polish subtitle does just that, thus the viewer sees “Sully” twice at the same time, as the original title and subtitle. This flouts rule 10 of Netflix timed text style guide, which states: “subtitle all plot pertinent and otherwise relevant onscreen text that is not covered in dialogue and/or redundant in the target language such as: ‘Based on True Events’, ‘In Loving Memory of Jane’, etc.”13 (note the use of the adjective “relevant”). The on-screen text may not be covered in dialogue, but it is definitely redundant. Incidentally, the verb “to sully” aptly describes what happens to the titular character, as the movie is not so much about the crash, but about a subsequent investigation aimed at destroying his career. This purely coincidental ambiguity is lost with the foreign viewer. Interestingly, the corpus of 36 titles available on Netflix does not seem to contain any more examples of redundancy. However, it is listed as a separate category in this work, because it is common elsewhere and its paucity on Netflix is only evidence of adherence to the logic of relevance. For instance, in Changeling (not currently available on Netflix and therefore not analysed and listed in this work as such), Angelina Jolie’s character, a mother, discovers that her little son Walter is missing. Panicking, she rusher from one bedroom of her house to another, repeatedly shouting “Walter!”. The Polish version of the movie had the boy’s name subtitled each instance it was uttered, though one subtitle would easily have done. Similarly, the HBO series The Outsider has the title

13 https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/215758617-Timed-TextStyle-Guide-General-Requirements, accessed on November 22, 2019.

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subtitled into Polish, though the translation (“Outsider”) is unnecessary and detracts from the appreciation of the opening credits.

14

Technical Inaccuracy

This small section relates to timing subtitles to audio and shot changes. Similarly to the preceding section, only one instance of misalignment is presented. The rationale for including this section is identical to that for the category of redundancy; though marginal in the corpus under scrutiny, it is pertinent from the point of view of subtitling practice and general adherence to relevance. Netflix subtitles do not suffer from this particular problem as a rule of thumb, largely because the timed text style guide is very precise as regards positioning.14 In the series Colony, a character is looking for her missing husband in a hospital. She gives the husband’s name to a nurse. As the nurse is checking the roster, there is a background announcement over the speaker, barely audible: “burn unit, third floor”. The Polish subtitle translates the announcement literally: “oddział oparzen, ´ trzecie pi˛etro”. When the Polish subtitle is still on, the nurse says “He’s not here”, which is subsequently translated in the next Polish subtitle as “Nie ma go tutaj” {He’s not here}. This is a positioning issue, which leaves the audience confused, or at best puts them to excessive processing effort; the Polish audience may be initially misled into thinking that the husband is in the hospital at the burn unit.

15

Irrelevance

The last section in the present chapter is heterogeneous. What the examples have in common is the subtitler’s decision to overtranslate, flouting the principle of relevance and adding to the original, not infrequently putting the audience to excessive cognitive effort. The following example of overtranslation comes from The Sinner: “Next thing I know she is there, screaming” subtitled as “Nagle ona zacz˛eła na mnie wrzeszcze´c” {suddenly she started screaming at me}. There are no clues, visual or otherwise, that the screaming was directed at the speaker. 14 https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/215758617-Timed-TextStyle-Guide-General-Requirements, rule 7, accessed on November 22, 2019.

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As the title suggests, the Netflix documentary The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann relates arguably the world’s best known missing child case. The story of the British girl, who disappeared in 2007 in Portugal and has neither been found nor confirmed dead to date, has been so widely publicised that most viewers are by now familiar with it. This fact is significant not only to the creators of the documentary, but also to the translators. For example, one fragment runs “…in terms of the preservation of the scene…”; the scene is the hotel room from which Madeleine disappeared in May 2007. The Polish subtitle renders it as “je´sli chodzi / o brak zabezpieczenia sceny zbrodni” {when it comes to lack of preservation of the crime scene}—an overtranslation, since there is no evidence to suggest that there was a crime. However, later in the episode the expression “crime scene” was used, translated as “scena zbrodni”. A character (co-author of a book about the case) says “We talked to a foundation in the capital, Lisbon”. This is a perfectly natural utterance in English. Portugal is not an exotic, unknown country, either in the UK or in Poland; Lisbon is a very well-known city. Therefore, the Polish subtitle “Rozmawiali´smy z fundacj˛a / w Lizbonie, stolicy kraju”, {we talked to a foundation in Lisbon, the country’s capital} is irrelevant, as in Polish the utterance is only natural when one wants to specify that the place is a capital city.

References Badstübner-Kizik, Camilla. 2017. Multilingualism in the Movies. Languages in Films Revisited. In Audiovisual Translation: Research and Use, ed. Mikołaj Deckert, 233–254. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Berezowski, Leszek. 1997. Dialect in Translation. Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego. Bogucki, Łukasz. 2004. A Relevance Framework for Constraints on Cinema Subtitling. Łód´z: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego. Bogucki, Łukasz. 2019. Areas and Methods of Audiovisual Translation Research, 3rd ed. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Burling, Alexis. 2019. Netflix. Tech Titans. Minneapolis, MN: Abdo Publishing. De Higes Andino, Irene. 2014. The Translation of Multilingual Films: Modes, Strategies, Constraints and Manipulation in the Spanish Translations of It’s a Free World…. Linguistica Antwerpiensia 13 (1): 211–231. Díaz-Cintas, Jorge. 2011. Dealing with Multilingual Films in Audiovisual Translation. In Translation, Sprachvariation, Mehrsprachigkeit. Festschrift für Lew

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Zybatow zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Wolfgang Pöckl, Ingeborg Ohnheiser, and Peter Sandrini, 215–233. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Fetner, Chris, Denise Kreeger, and Allison Smith. 2016. Agile Mediascapes. Languages and the Media: Agile Mediascapes—Personalising the Future. Paper delivered at the 11th International Conference on Language Transfer in Audiovisual Media, Berlin. Gottlieb, Henrik. 1992. “Subtitling: A New University Discipline”. In Teaching Translation and Interpreting. Training, Talent and Experience, ed. Cay Dollerup and Anne Loddegaard, 161–170. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Gottlieb, Henrik. 1998. Subtitling. In Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, ed. Mona Baker, 244–248. London and New York: Routledge. Hermans, Theo (ed.). 1985. The Manipulation of Literature: Studies in Literary Translation. London: Croom Helm. House, Juliane. 1977. A Model for Translation Quality Assessment. Tübingen: Narr. Verlag. Kruger, Jan-Louis, Agnieszka Szarkowska, and Izabela Krejtz. 2015. Subtitles on the Moving Image: an Overview of Eye Tracking Studies. Refractory : A Journal of Entertainment Media 25: 1–14. Newmark, Peter. 1988. Approaches to Translation. Hertfordshire: Prentice Hall. Nida, Eugene. 1998. Language, Culture and Translation. Journal of Foreign Languages 3: 29–33. Nord, Christiane. 1997. Translating as a Purposeful Activity: Functionalist Approaches Explained. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. Pedersen, Jan. 2018. From Old Tricks to Netflix: How Local are Interlingual Subtitling Norms for Streamed Television? Journal of Audiovisual Translation 1 (1): 81–100. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1813/2004. On the Different Methods of Translating, trans. Susan Bernofsky. In The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd. ed., ed. Lawrence Venuti, 43–63. London and New York: Routledge. Snell-Hornby, Mary. 1988. Translation Studies: An Integrated Approach. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Snell-Hornby, Mary. 2006. The Turns of Translation Studies: New Paradigms or Shifting Viewpoints? Benjamins Translation Library Vol. 66. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Studniarz, Sławomir. 2011. Pi˛ec´ zywotów ˙ Kruka, czyli o polskich przekładach wiersza ‘The Raven’ Edgara Allana Poego. Acta Neophilologica XIII: 281– 302. Venuti, Lawrence. 1995. The Translator’s Invisibility. New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER 6

Conclusion

Abstract This short section outlines viable research avenues and summarises the potential behind the application of Relevance Theory to interlingual subtitling. Keywords Research trends · Audiovisual translation (AVT) · Cognitive disfluency

The notorious gap between theory and practice has plagued translation studies for decades (cf. e.g. Arrojo 1998). Recently, however, academics have focused less on the nature of translation and pertinent problems such as equivalence and untranslatability, instead turning their attention to applications, translator training, automatisation of the translation process, etc. Sun (2014: 63) speaks of “the period of professional theory of translation” as the current trend, following literary, linguistic and cultural turns. Huang and Liu (2019) conducted a bibliometric analysis of developmental trends in translation studies between 2014 and 2018 to discover that: • audiovisual translation (AVT) ranks prominently among the most frequently explored topics (the second most popular keyword after, predictably, “translation”); © The Author(s) 2020 Ł. Bogucki, A Relevance-Theoretic Approach to Decision-Making in Subtitling, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51803-5_6

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• a shift from linguistic to extralinguistic factors within TS is observable; • equivalence as a translation paradigm has fallen by the wayside, largely replaced by adaptation and re-translation in terms of research interest; • translator (and interpreter) training and translation competence boldly make their way into the most popular research topics; • trends in translation studies follow those in linguistics (e.g. multilingualism or corpus studies) and • a shift towards disciplinary self-reflection is observable, whereby translation scholars look back on past achievements to determine the way forward, the current status of the discipline and potential research avenues. AVT has never suffered much from the theory/practice divide. In fact, most of the earliest publications on AVT (to name Laks 1957; Dollerup 1974) were essentially glorified guidelines for subtitlers. AVT conferences are normally frequented by practitioners; few academics are pure theoreticians and none assume the “tower of Babel” stance. Currently, AVT may be going through an identity crisis of sorts (its methodology and scope, in particular the relation to media accessibility, needs refining), but the practical application of AVT research is unquestionable. What the present volume can offer to AVT researchers, students, and translators is precisely a merger of theory and practice. A theoretical approach to communication, rooted in cognitive linguistics, is confronted here with AVT as demonstrated by a corpus of subtitles from arguably the most popular streaming service. Even at first glance, Relevance Theory appears to be practice-oriented; its aim is to determine how to communicate better, more efficiently and with less effort. However, despite its theoretical applicability to secondary communication (translation), practical applications have been few and far between. Recently, Stroinska ´ and Drzazga (2018: 99) commented that “[l]ack of practical applications of Relevance Theory in translation practice is the strongest criticism in the literature”. The 15 translation issues listed in Chapter 5, exemplified by subtitles from 36 audiovisual texts, shed light on the application of RT to AVT. There have been quality assessment studies of Netflix subtitles, not only among master’s level dissertations. However, they either do not follow any particular linguistic framework, instead of concentrating on audience reception (Di Giovanni 2018), or make recourse to generic

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paradigms of limited practical applicability in the given case, such as the normative approach (Pedersen 2018). As evidenced above in Huang and Liu’s list, reliance on current developments in linguistics is a strong trend in translation studies. Relevance Theory may not be a current development per se, but it continues to be en vogue among linguists, constantly developing and broadening its scope. “It would seem to me that the recognition that translation is dependent on interpretive resemblance has far-reaching consequences for people involved in machine translation who work largely on the basis of transcoding. If relevance theory is right, then the progress toward fully adequate translation will require programs that can derive and compare interpretations of texts, which presupposes, among other things, that they can handle considerations of relevance” (Gutt 1990: 160). These words were written 30 years ago, when machine translation and computer-assisted translation were both a far cry from what they are today. Currently, AVT (in particular subtitling) relies heavily on automatisation and artificial intelligence. A few years ago, Georgakopolou and Bywood (2014) concluded that the application of machine and computerassisted translation to AVT had been slower than in other translation domains, but more recently, Matusov et al. (2019) described the creation of a neural machine translation system for subtitling, based on syntax and semantics. Machine learning (and its application to AVT) has developed to an extent that allows Gutt’s vision of programmes that “can handle considerations of relevance” (above) to be considered a foreseeable reality. In the past 35 years, many thousands of publications on Relevance Theory have appeared worldwide.1 In the field of translation and interpreting alone, there are nearly 500 publications. However, only a small fraction pertain to AVT as such, and even fewer to subtitling. This can be seen as odd, given the position of AVT on the map of translation studies (see above). Relevance Theory has every potential to serve as a theoretical approach to AVT. However, this assumption has so far been backed up only by the present theoretical discussion, exemplified by a corpus that is perhaps sufficiently large and diversified, but lacking in a proper reception study deploying experimental, quantitative, perhaps introspective methods. Such research could not possibly be presented herein given the small format of the present work. However, this volume can

1 https://personal.ua.es/francisco.yus/rt2.html, accessed on February 21, 2020.

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easily serve as a prolegomenon to a comprehensive scrutiny, for instance, triangulating an eye tracking examination against a questionnaire-based reception study. The application of Relevance Theory to media accessibility, for instance, audio description or subtitles for the deaf and the hard-of-hearing, also seems both possible and desirable. The added value of this book seems to lie in its disciplinary selfreflection (cf. Huang and Liu 2019 detailed above). While the past relevance-theoretic approach to subtitling (Bogucki 2004) is not the focus of the present work, it deserves credit as the spark of the idea for this research. Despite unquestionable major advances in the practice and theory of subtitling, Relevance Theory continues to be a valid paradigm for research on decision-making. Advances in methodology can make this research valid, generalisable, testable and replicable. In order to verify the research value of the present study, it might be advisable to juxtapose it with the concept of cognitive disfluency (Alter 2013; Kühl and Eitel 2016). Disfluency refers to the (meta)cognitive experience of difficulty in completing a task. An easy task is processed heuristically and intuitively, while a difficult one necessitates analytic processing, which is normally desirable. As Relevance Theory generally advocates a maximum of effect with a minimum of effort, it is potentially interesting to investigate whether disfluent processing of subtitles (i.e. one which generates more effort) may be desirable and under what circumstances. This, however, calls for a separate study.

References Alter, Adam L. 2013. The Benefits of Cognitive Disfluency. Current Directions in Psychological Science 22: 437–442. Arrojo, Rosemary. 1998. The Revision of the Traditional Gap Between Theory & Practice & the Empowerment of Translation in Postmodern Times. The Translator 4 (1): 25–48. Bogucki, Łukasz. 2004. A Relevance Framework for Constraints on Cinema Subtitling. Łód´z: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego. Di Giovanni, Elena. 2018. The Reception of Professional and Non-Professional Subtitles: Agency, Awareness and Change. In Mediating Lingua-Cultural Scenarios in Audiovisual Translation. Special Issue of Cultus: The Journal of Intercultural Mediation and Communication 11: 18–37. Dollerup, Cay. 1974. On Subtitles in Television Programmes. Babel 20: 197– 202.

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Georgakopoulou, Panayota, and Lindsay Bywood. 2014. MT in Subtitling and the Rising Profile of the Post-Editor. Multilingual 25 (1): 24–28. Gutt, Ernst-August. 1990. A Theoretical Account of Translation—Without a Translation Theory. Target 2: 135–164. Huang, Qin, and Liu Furong. 2019. International Translation Studies from 2014 to 2018: A Bibliometrics Analysis and Its Implications. Translation Review 105 (1): 34–57. Kühl, Tim, and Alexander Eitel. 2016. Effects of Disfluency on Cognitive and Metacognitive Processes and Outcomes. Metacognition Learning 11: 1–13. Laks, Simon. 1957. Le sous-titrage des films. Sa technique. Son esthétique. Unpublished Manuscript. Matusov, Evgeny, Patrick Wilken, and Yota Georgakopoulou. 2019. Customizing Neural Machine Translation for Subtitling. Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Machine Translation (WMT), Volume 1: Research Papers. Association for Computational Linguistics, 82–93. Available from http://www.aclweb. org/anthology/W19-5209. Pedersen, Jan. 2018. From Old Tricks to Netflix: How Local are Interlingual Subtitling Norms for Streamed Television? Journal of Audiovisual Translation 1 (1): 81–100. Stroinska, ´ Magda, and Grazyna ˙ Drzazga. 2018. Relevance Theory, Interpreting, and Translation. In The Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies and Linguistics, ed. Kirsten Malmkjaer, 95–106. London and New York: Routledge. Sun, Shun-Chih. 2014. Professional Translation as New Trend of Translation. International Journal of Linguistics and Communication 2 (2): 63–73.

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Filmography The following list contains the title, year of production and name of director/creator of each audiovisual text used as a source of examples in the empirical part of the present work. Titles mentioned indirectly as intertextual references, or titles not from Netflix, brought up to contrast with the main corpus, are not listed. After Life. 2019. Ricky Gervais. Altered Carbon. 2018–. Laeta Kalogridis. Bates Motel. 2013–2017. Anthony Cipriano, Carlton Cuse, Kerry Ehrin. Birdman. 2014. Guy Bolongaro. Colony. 2016–2018. Ryan J. Condal, Carlton Cuse. Conspiracy. 2001. Frank Pierson. Conversations with a Killer. The Ted Bundy Tapes. 2019. Joe Berlinger.

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Designated Survivor. 2016–. David Guggenheim. Disturbia. 2007. D. J. Caruso. Dolemite Is My Name. 2019. Craig Brewer. Game Night. 2018. John Francis Daley, Jonathan Goldstein. Gone Girl. 2014. David Fincher. Hinterland. 2013–. Ed Thomas. In the Tall Grass. 2019. Vincenzo Natali. John Wick. 2014. Chad Stahelski. John Wick 2. 2017. Chad Stahelski. Kong: Skull Island. 2017. Jordan Vogt-Roberts. La Casa de Papel. 2017–. Álex Pina. La Forêt. 2017. Delinda Jacobs. Manhattan Murder Mystery. 1993. Woody Allen. Mindhunter. 2017–. Joe Penhall. Murder Mystery. 2019. Kyle Newacheck. Operation Argo. 2012. Ben Affleck. Ouicksand (Störst av allt). 2019. Hanna Ardehn, Felix Sandman, David Dencik. Ozark. 2017–. Bill Dubuque, Mark Williams. Patriots Day. 2016. Peter Berg. Prison Break. 2005–2017. Paul Scheuring. Pulp Fiction. 1994. Quentin Tarantino. Ricky Gervais: Humanity. 2018. John L. Spencer. Stranger Things. 2016–. Matt Duffer, Ross Duffer. Sully. 2016. Clint Eastwood. The Big Bang Theory. 2007–2019. Chuck Lorre, Bill Prady. The Big Lebowski. 1998. Joel Coen, Ethan Coen. The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann. 2019. Chris Smith. The Laundromat. 2019. Steven Soderbergh. The Sinner. 2017. Derek Simonds.

Index

A audiovisual translation (AVT), 1–5, 16, 18, 22–26, 28, 29, 35–39, 43–46, 55–58, 76, 77, 79, 83, 85, 86, 93–95

C cognitive disfluency, 96 cognitive effort, 2, 4, 5, 12, 17, 26, 29–31, 38, 39, 55, 58–60, 62, 76, 78–81, 87, 89 condensation, 85 context, 4, 15, 25, 26, 28, 30, 37, 41–43, 47, 48, 55, 61, 66, 68, 69, 75, 76, 83, 84, 86, 87 culture-specificity, 58–60, 63, 64

D decision-making, 3–5, 10, 26, 31, 39, 46–48, 96 direct translation, 16, 83

E equivalence, 14–16, 39, 55, 71, 93, 94 eye tracking, 2, 4, 29, 30, 38, 45, 48, 60, 87, 96 I indirect translation, 16 intersemiotic translation, 24 intertextuality, 44, 68 M manifestness, 13, 41, 42, 46 multilinguality, 70, 77, 79 N norms, 10, 14, 26–30, 36, 38, 55 P paratext, 43, 44, 79 principle of relevance, 11, 12, 31, 43, 57, 59, 70, 71, 84, 89

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 Ł. Bogucki, A Relevance-Theoretic Approach to Decision-Making in Subtitling, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51803-5

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112

INDEX

processing effort, 5, 12, 13, 15, 22, 30, 31, 46, 47, 49, 71, 88, 89 R reception studies, 3, 22, 30, 95, 96 redundancy, 42, 87–89 Relevance Theory (RT), 4, 5, 9–18, 22, 23, 27, 29, 30, 35, 39–41, 45–47, 55, 56, 62, 81, 94–96 S subtitling, 2–5, 10, 12, 14, 17, 18, 21–31, 35–40, 43, 46–48, 54,

56, 62, 71, 79, 80, 85, 86, 89, 95, 96 subtitling guidelines, 27, 28, 36, 85 subtitling quality assessment, 25, 27, 85

T target audience expectations, 23, 27, 36–38, 44, 48 translational constraints, 4, 26, 36, 37, 54 translation quality assessment (TQA), 15, 17, 64