Subtitles are the short line by line written translations of audio visual formats such as cinema, television, videos and computer games, which appear at the bottom of the screen and which change according to the screen dialogue or any other audio that requires translation.
The Dutch Language
Dutch is the official language of Aruba, Belgium, Curaçao, Netherlands, Sint Maarten and Suriname. It is also an official language of the Benelux Union, the European Union, the South American Union and the Caribbean Community. It is an Indo-European language which belongs to the West Germanic family of languages. There are approximately 28 million native speakers of the Dutch language.
Definitions of Subtitling
As defined by Diaz Cintas J and Remael A in their book Audiovisual Translation: Subtitling, “Subtitling may be defined as a translation practice that consists of presenting a written text, generally on the lower part of the screen, that discursive elements that appear in the image (letters, inserts, graffiti, inscriptions, placards, and the like), and the information that is contained on the soundtrack (songs, voices off).” Diaz Cintas also names two main types of subtitling services which are intralinguistic subtitles and interlinguistic subtitles, in addition to a number of other types.
Shuttleworth and Cowie defined subtitling as “the process of providing synchronized captions for film and television dialogue”. They also said that subtitling is a term used to refer to one of the two main methods of language transfer used in translating types of mass audio visual communication such as film and television.
O’Connell, a scholar in the field of subtitling, defines subtitling as “supplementing the original voice sound track by adding written text on the screen”. While pointing out the benefits of subtitling over dubbing, O’Connell points out that subtitling is an inexpensive, quick, foreign culture friendly and generally fairly politically correct mode of screen translation.
Jan Ivarsson another notable authority in the field of subtitling classified subtitling into various branches which are subtitling for cinema and television, multilingual subtitling, teletext subtitling, reduced subtitling, subtitling live or in real time, the translation of opera, theatrical works, conferences, etc. However the two primary branches of subtitling as mentioned by various scholars are intralinguistic subtitles and interlinguistic subtitles.