SubComm is an initiative intended to bring together professional subtitlers and researchers with an interest in subtitling. We hope this community will allow all of us to get to know each other, learn from each other, and create new opportunities for research and collaborations for the benefit of the subtitling profession.
by Jan Pedersen Metaphors make up one of the classic translation problems, maybe even the most important one, according to the late translation scholar Peter Newmark. Still, they are severely under-researched in audiovisual translation (AVT). This struck me as odd, and I decided to do something about it. Metaphors and AVT have a lot in … Read more
Between Objectivity and Fear: Audio Description in Spanish Horror Films By María López Rubio Spanish horror films by directors such as Álex de la Iglesia and Paco Plaza use visual and auditory tension to create fear. For audio describers, this creates an important challenge: how to convey what happens on screen for blind and visually-impaired … Read more
Overcoming Information Asymmetry in the Subtitling Industry I’m sure many subtitlers can relate: having to explain time and time again what it is exactly that they do. I can certainly remember times when I or colleagues found ourselves explaining the difference between the myriad types of subtitles we could provide to clients. Researchers like Callum … Read more
Subtitling for NETFLIX: How subtitlers experience it and what they wish for the future By Tinka Stössel How much do we really know about what it’s like to subtitle for Netflix? With its global, competitive, and highly technological nature, subtitling for streaming is subject to frequent changes and the system remains rather mysterious from the outside. But what about … Read more
Efficient and Effective Subtitling Revision: Finding the Sweet Spot Between “Good Enough” and “Perfect” by Rita Menezes Subtitling revision is often invisible. Viewers rarely think about it, and yet it is precisely at this stage that subtitles become truly fit for purpose. It is also where things get complicated. Revisers are not simply correcting errors. … Read more
Why should AVT practitioners and academics collaborate in this day and age? by Max Deryagin No doubt, a question everyone in our field should ask themselves, and a big one at that. Indeed, many might consider such collaboration to be somewhat fruitless — a waste of time even — or doubt that the other party … Read more
by María Aguilar Lara Hi! My name is María and I’m excited to introduce myself as SubComm’s new research assistant. This is my first blog post on SubComm’s website, but you will be hearing more from me if you follow SubComm’s Instagram https://www.instagram.com/projectsubcomm :). I did my undergrad in English Literature and Linguistics at the … Read more
By Hannah and Tiina As we prepare for our Subtitle Chat next week, we’ve been reflecting on our activities over the past few months. As we wrote in this blog post, Hannah was busy having a baby, and Tiina was starting a new job. However, the SubComm work went on, though in a slightly more … Read more
After a few months’ break, we hosted another Subtitle Chat on 24 January. The theme we chose for this chat was collaboration. We wanted to celebrate the publication of our article which explores academics’ and practitioners’ views of research collaborations (more on the article later), so we thought it would be nice to mark the … Read more
By Tiina Tuominen Today is the feast day of St. Jerome, the day to celebrate translators everywhere. I hope everyone is having a great day! SubComm is currently in the middle of a somewhat quiet period. As we mentioned in our last blog post in June, this autumn is an unusual time for both Hannah … Read more
