Skip to main content
Presented to you through Paradigm Publishing Services

John Benjamins Publishing Company

Visit our Partner Page See all our books
Chapter
Licensed
Unlicensed Requires Authentication

Subtitles and line-breaks: Towards improved readability

Abstract

Psycholinguistic literature shows that reading is so highly structured and formalized as to make it a routine and automated task. So long as the syntax and lexicon of the text both remain within normal variation, the flow of reading is not interrupted. When accustomed patterns are violated, this produces an immediate and substantial increase in the level of strain placed upon the reader. This paper focuses specifically on the difficulties that film subtitle readers may encounter as a result of arbitrary line-breaks, i.e. text segmentation that does not follow the principal rules of syntax. A qualitative analysis on a varied corpus of film subtitles allowed us to identify instances of arbitrary line-breaks, to comment on them and to formulate hypotheses concerning possible ways to resolve such issues by employing a more suitable target-oriented subtitle layout.

Abstract

Psycholinguistic literature shows that reading is so highly structured and formalized as to make it a routine and automated task. So long as the syntax and lexicon of the text both remain within normal variation, the flow of reading is not interrupted. When accustomed patterns are violated, this produces an immediate and substantial increase in the level of strain placed upon the reader. This paper focuses specifically on the difficulties that film subtitle readers may encounter as a result of arbitrary line-breaks, i.e. text segmentation that does not follow the principal rules of syntax. A qualitative analysis on a varied corpus of film subtitles allowed us to identify instances of arbitrary line-breaks, to comment on them and to formulate hypotheses concerning possible ways to resolve such issues by employing a more suitable target-oriented subtitle layout.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Preface vii
  4. Introduction: Audiovisual translation comes of age 1
  5. Recent developments and challenges in audiovisual translation research 11
  6. Part 1. Electronic databases and corpora
  7. ICT approaches
  8. Forlixt 1 – The Forlì Corpus of Screen Translation: Exploring macrostructures 37
  9. Forlixt 1 – The Forlì Corpus of Screen Translation: Exploring microstructures 51
  10. New tools for translators: INTCA, an electronic dictionary of interjections 63
  11. Linguistic approaches
  12. Spoken language in film dubbing: Target language norms, interference and translational routines 79
  13. High felicity: A speech act approach to quality assessment in subtitling 101
  14. Inserts in modern script-writing and their translation into Spanish 117
  15. Part 2. Perception and quality
  16. Empirical approaches
  17. The perception of dubbese: An Italian study 135
  18. Acceptance of the norm or suspension of disbelief? The case of formulaic language in dubbese 149
  19. Measuring the perception of the screen translation of Un Posto al Sole : A cross-cultural study 165
  20. Cultural and psycholinguistic approaches
  21. Taming teen-language: The adaptation of Buffyspeak into Italian 183
  22. From darkness to light in subtitling 197
  23. Subtitles and line-breaks: Towards improved readability 211
  24. Socio-economic approaches
  25. The localization of promotional discourse on the internet 227
  26. Issues of quality in screen translation: Problems and solutions 241
  27. References 257
  28. Filmography 285
  29. Index 289
Between Text and Image
This chapter is in the book Between Text and Image
https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.78.21per

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Preface vii
  4. Introduction: Audiovisual translation comes of age 1
  5. Recent developments and challenges in audiovisual translation research 11
  6. Part 1. Electronic databases and corpora
  7. ICT approaches
  8. Forlixt 1 – The Forlì Corpus of Screen Translation: Exploring macrostructures 37
  9. Forlixt 1 – The Forlì Corpus of Screen Translation: Exploring microstructures 51
  10. New tools for translators: INTCA, an electronic dictionary of interjections 63
  11. Linguistic approaches
  12. Spoken language in film dubbing: Target language norms, interference and translational routines 79
  13. High felicity: A speech act approach to quality assessment in subtitling 101
  14. Inserts in modern script-writing and their translation into Spanish 117
  15. Part 2. Perception and quality
  16. Empirical approaches
  17. The perception of dubbese: An Italian study 135
  18. Acceptance of the norm or suspension of disbelief? The case of formulaic language in dubbese 149
  19. Measuring the perception of the screen translation of Un Posto al Sole : A cross-cultural study 165
  20. Cultural and psycholinguistic approaches
  21. Taming teen-language: The adaptation of Buffyspeak into Italian 183
  22. From darkness to light in subtitling 197
  23. Subtitles and line-breaks: Towards improved readability 211
  24. Socio-economic approaches
  25. The localization of promotional discourse on the internet 227
  26. Issues of quality in screen translation: Problems and solutions 241
  27. References 257
  28. Filmography 285
  29. Index 289
Downloaded on 19.4.2026 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1075/btl.78.21per/html
Scroll to top button