Topic:On the name and nature of subtitling
Time: 15:00-17:00 (14 May,2015)
Venue: A421, Building 6
Participants: Doctoral program students, advanced visiting scholars and teaching staff
Chairperson: Prof. ZengLisha
Speaker: Lv Jie & Prof.Zeng Lisha
Recorder in English: WangJunchao
The forum started by a presentation given by LvJie, Ph.D candidate, on the topic of “On the name and nature of subtitling”.The presentation consists of four parts: (1) the definition and redefinition of subtitling; (2) textual features of subtitling; (3) a tentative theoretical framework for an academic study; (4) key issues unsolved. She systematically and critically examined the previous studies, focusing on the definitions of subtitling or dubbings such as the ones given by Baker and Citus. Seeing the research topic from semiotic perspective, Ms. Lv discussed Jakonbon’s three-forked definitions of translation and put forward the definition of subtitling in a new, insightful way. Then, she moved onto the nature of subtitling by analyzing a variety of existing theories supported by her personal practices, and generalized several essential aspects of subtitling, from which she developed an analytical framework for theoretic studies of subtitling. Ms. Lv concluded her presentation by proposing such issues as constraints from multimodality,text and context.
The presentation was positively commented by Prof. Zeng Lisha, who then gave a lecture on how to conduct scientific researches and investigate into films and TV series translation, closely related to Ms.Lv’s presentation.
For a start, Prof. Zeng emphasized the importance and skills of how to make an attractive format on delivery a PPT presentation.Then, he elaborated on the methodology of how to comprehensively conduct literature review from the aspect of examining or arranging the previous definitions. As to the examination of previous definitions about the name and nature of film subtitling or dubbings, he introduced four categories of giving definitions in academic researches such as scientific definition, auxiliary definition,descriptive definition and working definition. What impressed those present most was his view of subtitling as a comprehensive art that highly integrates images and emotions with semiotics in a dynamic multimodal context. He gave a fine-grained dissection of typical difficulties in subtitling, like plots,figure conflicts and images, internal emotions and idiolects, which help to constructan appropriate and coherent meaning in the film subtitling translation. His lecture ended with the methodology of doing research, namely, a combination of top-down and bottom-up research, which was illustrated on the study of film subtitling and dubbing translating. According to him, the relevant theoretic study may integrate the research methods of induction and deduction or comprehensively cover the macroscopic and microscopic studies. With the help of a global view,we can analyze authentic data through induction and achieve an empirical understanding of the research object. Then, it is necessary to abstract a theoretical framework for the research topic with a set of knowledge-based concepts generalized from empiric studies, where theories or models proposed can be falsified, validated or revised.
Two hours might be absolutely long for a hot afternoon, but was relatively short for such an insightful and substantiated forum. The end of the forum saw a heated discussion and exchange of ideas on subtitling and doing scientific researches.
