Subtitling on the cusp of its futures

Abstract

This chapter aims to locate film subtitling at the crucial juncture between its recent past as a maturing practice and a young discipline, and the uncharted territories of its future, with the questions that it compels the field to revisit and the new ones that it raises. With digitization, subtitling has become faster and cheaper, already a trademark of subtitling by comparison with dubbing. Three types of phenomena are usually identified, all fundamental in their impact on the core activity for interlingual subtitling: representation through language, in cross-cultural mode. In reception, the cross-cultural dimension of subtitling has been largely by-passed, except for a few studies of humour and one empirical study of comprehension of implicit meaning across culture. Like audiovisual translation generally, film subtitling is at a turning point and is embracing the new sets of challenges that will establish it fully as a discipline, for which technology has given it new tools.