Over 6000 different languages are used in the world today, but the conventions of 'media speak' are far from universal and the complexities of translation are rarely acknowledged by the industry, audiences or scholars. Redressing this neglect, Speaking in Subtitles argues that the specific contingencies of translation are vital to screen media's global storytelling. Looking at a range of examples, from silent era intertitling to contemporary crowdsourced subtitling, and from avant-garde dubbing to the increasing practice of 'fansubbing', Tessa Dwyer proposes that screen media itself is a fundamentally 'translational' field.

Over 6000 different languages are used in the world today, but the conventions of 'media speak' are far from universal and the complexities of translation are rarely acknowledged by the industry, audiences or scholars. Redressing this neglect, Speaking in Subtitles argues that the specific contingencies of translation are vital to screen media's global storytelling. Looking at a range of examples, from silent era intertitling to contemporary crowdsourced subtitling, and from avant-garde dubbing to the increasing practice of 'fansubbing', Tessa Dwyer proposes that screen media itself is a fundamentally 'translational' field.

The work of writing closed captions for television and DVD is not simply transcribing dialogue, as one might assume at first, but consists largely of making rhetorical choices. For Sean Zdenek, when captioners describe a sound they are interpreting and creating contexts, they are assigning significance, they are creating meaning that doesn t necessarily exist in the soundtrack or the script. And in nine chapters he analyzes the numerous complex rhetorical choices captioners make, from abbreviating dialogue so it will fit on the screen and keep pace with the editing, to whether and how to describe background sounds, accents, or slurred speech, to nonlinguistic forms of sound communication such as sighing, screaming, or laughing, to describing music, captioned silences (as when a continuous noise suddenly stops), and sarcasm, surprise, and other forms of meaning associated with vocal tone. Throughout, he also looks at closed captioning style manuals and draws on interviews with professional captioners and hearing-impaired viewers. Threading through all this is the novel argument that closed captions can be viewed as texts worthy of rhetorical analysis and that this analysis can lead the entertainment industry to better standards and practices for closed captioning, thereby better serve the needs of hearing-impaired viewers. The author also looks ahead to the work yet to be done in bringing better captioning practices to videos on the Internet, where captioning can take on additional functions such as enhancing searchability. While scholarly work has been done on captioning from a legal perspective, from a historical perspective, and from a technical perspective, no one has ever done what Zdenek does here, and the original analytical models he offers are richly interdisciplinary, drawing on work from the fields of technical communication, rhetoric, media studies, and disability studies."

The articles collected in this publication combine diachronic and synchronic research with the description of updated teaching experiences showing the educational role of subtitled audiovisuals in various foreign language learning settings.

An introduction by leading experts in the field to the fascinating subject of translating audiovisual programmes for the television, the cinema, the Internet and the stage and the problems the differences between cultures can cause.

Based on sound research and first-hand experience in the field, Subtitling through Speech Recognition: Respeaking is the first book to present a comprehensive overview of the production of subtitles through speech recognition in Europe. Topics covered include the origins of subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing, the different methods used to provide live subtitles and the training and professional practice of respeaking around the world. The core of the book is devoted to elaborating an in-depth respeaking course, including the skills required before, during and after the respeaking process. The volume also offers detailed analysis of the reception of respeaking, featuring information about viewers’ preferences, comprehension and perception of respoken subtitles obtained with eye-tracking technology. Accompanying downloadable resources feature a wealth of video clips and documents designed to illustrate the material in the book and to serve as a basis for the exercises included at the end of each chapter. The working language of the book is English, but the downloadable resources also contain sample material in Dutch, French, Galician, German, Italian and Spanish. Subtitling through Speech Recognition: Respeaking is designed for use as a coursebook for classroom practice or as a handbook for self-learning. It will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as freelance and in-house language professionals. It will also find a reading public among broadcasters, cinema, theatre and museum managers, as well as the deaf and members of deaf associations, who may use the volume to support future campaigns and enhance the quality of the speech-to-text accessibility they provide to their members.

This book brings together current thinking on informal language learning and the findings of over 30 years of research on captions (same language subtitles for the deaf and hard-of-hearing) to present a new model of language learning from captioned viewing and a future roadmap for research and practice in this field. Language learners may have normal hearing but they are ‘hard-of-listening’ and find it difficult to follow the rapid or unclear speech in many films and TV programmes. Vanderplank considers whether watching with captions not only enables learners to understand and enjoy foreign language television and films but also helps them to improve their foreign language skills. Captioned Media in Foreign Language Learning and Teaching will be of interest to students and researchers involved in second language acquisition teaching and research, as well as practising language teachers and teacher trainers.