subtitling round-up

Some interesting pieces about subtitling have appeared recently on the www so I thought I'd do a bit of a round-up.

My favourite, (not just because of the kind acknowledgement!), has to be Samuel Bréan's excellently-titled

godard     english     cannes: The Reception of Film Socialisme‘s “Navajo English” Subtitles in Senses of Cinema. Samuel is also a contributor to the ATAA blog, which is well worth reading (in fact I stole the idea of the press round-up from there). 

There's interesting work out there on orality in subtitling. You probably already know Pierre-Alexis Mével's article on subtitling La Haine and Marie-Noëlle Guillot's piece 'Oral et illusion d’oral : indices d’oralité dans les sous-titres de dialogues de film'. See also Claire Ellender's article 'Transporting the Aquarium: Overcoming the Challenges of Subtitling Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank into French'.

So far, so very French-centric, but see also an interesting piece on the audiovisual translation scene in Egypt, a short piece on the work of the subtitling company Anis Ebeid and an amusing piece from an Indian site which explains how 1789 can be the obvious and only translation for 1776 (dammit, more French - but definitely one for the next numbers post!).

On the SDH subtitling side, the Guardian points out that finding a theatrical screening with SDH subtitles isn't always easy (a spirited debate follows in the comments) and the Telegraph complains about the quality of live subtitling on the BBC (typical, grumble, chunter).

Lastly, but not leastly, I was overjoyed over the summer to find that the folks at Orange had released a new 'Don't let a mobile phone ruin your movie' ad: don't let a mobile phone ruin your subtitles...



There's a nice interview here with Sionann O'Neill, the other subtitler of Potiche.

Btw the image is from Umbrellas of Cherbourg. For more charming translation-and-film-related screenshots see this post on Les Piles Intermédiaires.