Thursday 17 May 2018

Why typography is important in subtitling

"Well, I'm back," she said.

I'm thinking about a paper I'm writing for the conference Beyond Words: Multimodal Encounters in Translation, which will take place in Cambridge in July 2018.

Part of the paper will talk about meaning-making in typography and specifically in film intertitles and subtitles. (I've said something about this before here)

Now I have come across this splendid fansubtitled video about Thranduil and the gems of Lasgalen, from Peter Jackson's Hobbit adaptation. Every character gets a different subtitle typeface:


So, two questions:

1) Which typeface is best suited to its character? Answers in the comments please. 
2) Which can you actually read without eyestrain? The video is shooting for accessibility, which is always a good thing, but the typefaces are not, really.

And if readers out there want to rank the typefaces in order of most to least accessible, I'm all ears!