Bridging the gap between non-professional subtitling and translator training: a collaborative approach

ABSTRACT

The impact of technology on audiovisual translation has been enormous, and it continues to change not only audiovisual production and distribution models but also the profile of the translator and the concept of audience. The development of new digital technologies has led to the emergence of internet communities of non-professional translators who subtitle popular TV series and films using freeware and sharing their collective intelligence. This article describes a teaching project which investigates the potential benefits of integrating activities inspired by non-professional subtitling into a formal teaching context. Making the most of their knowledge as fans as well as of their linguistic skills and socio-cultural awareness, students work in teams to produce interlingual subtitles for different episodes from a variety of TV series, including comedy, medical drama, crime and science fiction. Such collaborative approach, based on a social constructivist view of translator training, has important pedagogical implications for areas such as translator competence, student motivation and learner autonomy.

KEYWORDS:

• Audiovisual translation
• fansubbing
• non-professional translation
• subtitling

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See also Pym (2011) for a description of the academic terms used to label non-professional translation.

2. The author has been introducing fansubbing activities into the translation classroom since the academic year 2011–2012 (Beseghi 2013).

3. Students should be made aware of the legal problems often associated with non-professional subtitling. In the case of Italy, fansubbing communities were able to skirt legal issues, claiming that what they were doing was ‘to release a translation conceived as a personal interpretation of a TV programme in order to share it with fellow fans’ (Massidda 2015, 22).