The Importance Of Spoken Language

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Subtitles should consist of simple and commonly used grammar in order to be quickly read and easily understood. What redounds to the increase of the reading speed is proper breaking of a sentence in two lines, usually into noun or verb phrase, and breaking long sentences into short ones (Georgakopoulou 2009: 23-25). One should not separate also “subject and verb, verb and object, article and noun, adjective and noun, preposition and the rest of a phrase and conjunction and the remainder of the sentence.” (Bogucki 2004: 74) Sometimes translators do not translate unnecessary elements of speech because of lack of space and time. In such situations the context of action, facial expressions, movements and intonation play a great role in understanding…show more content…
Faced with such problems, the translator has to decide on the importance of these features to the plot and understanding of the content. If there is no connection between those aspects the translator may not display the spoken language features leav-ing it to be grasped by the recipients from the soundtrack. If there is a need to reproduce the spoken language features, for instance, to show the level of education of a character or the social position, the translator would use appropriate vocabulary to do so (Georga-kopoulou 2009: 26). The lack of space and time force translators to reduce the content of subtitles therefore some discourse elements are not translated and some are con-densed(Georgakopoulou 2009: 26). Kovačič (1991: 409) divides discourse elements into three categories: indispensable, partly dispensable and dispensable. Indispensable are those elements that carry information vital to follow and understand the plot. Partly dispensable are those elements that may be condensed and dispensable elements are those that may be entirely omitted by the translators, even if there is space and time for their translation, because they do not carry any vital information (Georgakopoulou 2009: 26-27).…show more content…
However, all dispensable elements mentioned above may be translated at times to represent urgency, character features and alike (Georgakopoulou 2009: 28). In order to decide what should be condensed, omitted or fully translated the translator should take into consideration the function of an element, “connotation, target audience’s assumed knowledge of the language and culture of the source language programme, feedback effect, media related constraints”(Georgakopoulou 2009: 29). Bogucki (2004: 71-73) in his article The Constraint of Relevance in Subtitling presents the Theory of Relevance as means to create subtitles. According to this theory the translator may assume that the viewer has some knowledge and interpreting skills that will help him to understand the audiovisual content thus the translation does not have to be very strict and full of perfect equivalents. The aim of subtitles is to convey the es-sence of the source text so that the viewer may instantly make inferences and grasp the content along with the visual stimulus without unnecessary effort. Of course, subtitling for people with hearing impairments is a different matter and in this case the importance of elements is slightly

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