Research paths in audiovisual translation

Is subtitling equally effective everywhere? A first cross-national study on the reception of interlingually subtitled messages

“…Regarding the latter point, we were aware that the traditional division of audiovisual countries based on the official dominant AVT method is not an accurate indicator of users' actual viewing habits, preferences and degrees of familiarity with subtitling (Chaume 2012;MCG 2007MCG , 2011. In fact, results show that in traditionally dubbing countries (Italy and Spain) viewers do use more dubbed than subtitled products, but they are also more open to subtitles than they used to be.…”

“…The traditional dubbing vs. subtitling division (Chiaro 2009;Danan 1991;Gottlieb 2004;Luyken, Herbst, Langham-Brown, Reid and Spinhof 1991) is in fact as handy as it is 8 inaccurate. Other forms of AVT have always been used to make audiovisual products available beyond their original borders, and different AVT methods have always coexisted in the same country across different platforms (Chaume 2012;MCG 2007MCG , 2011. Indeed, nowadays, mixed situations seem to be taking over from previous clear-cut settings, and individual habits and preferences seem to be generating a growing discrepancy between each country's official AVT policy and actual viewers' habits.…”

“…However, especially in Spain, subtitling is gaining popularity thanks to digital broadcasting and the option offered by many cinemas to watch a film either dubbed or subtitled (Chaume 2012;MCG 2007MCG , 2011 Poland, on the other hand, is considered a stronghold of voice-over even though in fact it is a "mixed" country (Bogucki 2004;Garcarz 2007;Gottlieb 1998;Szarkowska 2009): surveys on audience preferences regarding AVT modes showed that a dozen years ago the majority of respondents still preferred voice-over (52%) to subtitles (4.5%) (e.g., Subbotko 2008). Voiceover, however, has been dominant only on Polish analogue television.…”

“…Accordingly, Europe was split into typically dubbing and typically subtitling countries (Kilborn 1993;Koolstra, Peeters and Spinhof 2002;Luyken, Herbst, Langham-Brown, Reid et Spinhof 1991), a division that oversimplified a composite scenario. The structural, linguistic, translational and receptive differences of these two methods (Chaume 2012;Díaz Cintas 2001;Gottlieb 1994) soon sparked off a lively debate on which one was better (Díaz Cintas 1999). For a long time, this debate was encouraged by a series of speculative claims on the merits and the drawbacks of dubbing vs. subtitling based on intuition and rules of thumb, but seldom supported by systematic empirical studies (for a review see Koolstra et al 2002;Perego, Del Missier and Bottiroli 2015;Marleau 1982).…”

“…The subtitle effectiveness hypothesis (Perego et al 2010(Perego et al , 2015, for instance, resulted from studies conducted in Italy, where dubbing still prevails both on TV and at the cinema (MGC 2011;Chaume 2012). This hypothesis supports the idea that, for viewers living in a dubbing country and claiming to have a limited experience with subtitled programs, the activity of processing a relatively simple subtitled film is cognitively effective (i.e., it results in good levels of general film content comprehension, memory for film dialogues, and visual scene recognition), and it does not negatively affect film enjoyment and viewers' appreciation (De Bruyker and d 'Ydewalle 2007;Hinkin et al 2014;Wissmath et al 2009).…”