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Advantages And Disadvantages Of Subtitles

Advantages and Disadvantages of Subtitles

Due to the globalization of our cultures and the fact that Hollywood is the leading film producer most videos on the market are in English.
To adopt all those films into target language culture, filmmakers use dubbing, voice-over and subtitles.

We are now going to focus on subtitles, which are the topic of this presentation.

Subtitles are used not only in films, but also in foreign television shows. Subtitles can translate speech, signs, letters and show sounds to aid the deaf and hard of hearing.

The advantages:

what I find the greatest advantage of subtitles is the fact that it preserves the original audio track. Thanks to subtitles, the characters speak with their original voice, and the ambience sounds are not disrupted by voice-over or inserted dubbing recordings.

Secondly, it would be strange to watch a film on feudal Japan, while characters talk to each in pure sophisticated English or in nearly literary German.

Another advantage is the fact that in subtitles the focus is put on the speech act. So the effects is more important than lexical elements.

That is why when we have American English: ?You?re kidding, right? Who can understand that shit?? in the film ?War?(2007) we get Polish: ?Jaja sobie robisz? A kto by zrozumiał jego gdakanie??, where the stress is shifted from the witness statement itself to the witness speaking a different language.

Moreover, besides preserving the audio track and giving some freedom of interpretation, subtitles can also serve as an aid not only for the deaf and hard of hearing, but also for people who learn the language, who need visual aid aside from audio input.

This is used in the English subtitles of English films, so besides written dialogs in the film we also get captions like ?[telephone ringing]? or ?[people clapping]?.

On the other hand, subtitles are limited both in time and space. An average subtitle consists of one or two lines of text,...