The effects of deaf and hard-of-hearing subtitles on the characterisation process: a cognitive stylistic study of The Wire

Abstract

This article reports on a project to investigate the discrepancies between audio dialogue and corresponding subtitles for deaf and hard-of hearing (DHOH) viewers in episode 1 of HBO's police procedural drama The Wire. We isolated and categorised discrepancies between the dialogue and the subtitles and used a cognitive model of characterisation to determine whether such differences were likely to lead to differing conceptions of character for DHOH viewers. We found that most omissions from the subtitles were of interpersonal features of dialogue, such as discourse markers, and that indications of the relationships between characters were adversely affected as a result. We suggest that the model of characterisation that we used can be valuable to professional subtitlers as a way of assessing the likely impact of deletions when subtitling drama.

Keywords:

• characterisation
• cognitive stylistics
• deaf
• hard-of-hearing
• subtitling
• The Wire

Notes on contributors

Dan McIntyre is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Huddersfield. His major publications include Stylistics (Cambridge University Press, 2010), Language and Style (Palgrave, 2010), and Point of View in Plays (John Benjamins, 2006). He is Reviews Editor of the journal Language and Literature and co-editor of Babel: The Language Magazine (www.babelzine.com).

Jane Lugea is Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at the University of Huddersfield. Her doctoral research was a contrastive study of Spanish and English narrative world-building strategies and she has published on the fictional world of Christopher Nolan's film Inception (Language and Literature, 2013). She is Assistant Editor of Babel: The Language Magazine.

Additional information

Funding

The research presented in this article was supported by a British Academy Small Research Grant [grant number SG113185], for which we are grateful.