Some remarks on a multimodal approach to subtitles

Abstract

For decades, translation has been dominated by a monomodal approach to communication, largely interested in the verbal channel of communication. This long-lasting line of reasoning has begun to reverse and is currently being phased out by multimodality - a more recent enterprise, which offers a global, holistic and plurisemiotic perspective on communication, which, in simplest terms, allows for verbal along with nonverbal signals. The present paper is an attempt to combine an originally semiotic theory applied to communication studies, i.e. multimodality, with one type of audiovisual translation, that of subtitling, with the aim of seeking justification for or finding arguments against the use of the technique widely employed in subtitling known as omission. In our analysis this technique is not only understood as a complete omission in the target text of a word or a sequence of words present in the source text, it is discussed in the context of other semiotic signals, in particular in relation to visual signals available on the screen. The question posed in the paper concerning whether and what to omit in subtitles is illustrated by a sample analysis of selected scenes excerpted from a romantic comedy “What Women Want”. The analysis has shown that while a translator is obliged to omit large portions of the original text in subtitles, the criteria governing whether and what to omit rather than reduce or leave in its 0riginal form still remain unclear. Whilst recent growth in the popularity of the multimodal approach, which focuses on the moving image and on the textual layer equally, generally speaking encourages reductions and omissions even more than was customary in the past, in some cases omission is not recommended, in particular when special pragmatic effects play a crucial role in a scene.