Regimenting languages on Korean television: subtitles and institutional authority

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of two different practices of subtitling on Korean television. It claims that these practices constitute different strategies of entextualization that produce authoritative regimentations of languages and discourses through manipulation of the intertextual distance between the original text and its representation. In the first type, impact captioning, or intralanguage subtitles on entertainment shows, different styles of subtitles distinguish the authoritative voice of the institution from the voices of ordinary speakers, allowing the media institution to simultaneously exploit speakers' problematic discourse for humorous purposes and to maintain an official image of neutrality and morality. In the second type, translation subtitling, which translates speech in languages that are assumed to be incomprehensible to viewers, subtitles enable the media institution to position its viewers with respect to linguistic competence, a process that is mediated by the construction of subtitles as neutral representations of spoken discourse. Therefore, in both cases, entextualization of discourse through subtitles must be seen as a strategy for the projection of institutional authority, reflecting metadiscursive interactional work done by the producers of media texts as they engage in acts of regimentation.