A segmentação em legendagem para surdos e ensurdecidos: um estudo baseado em corpus

Abstract

Compared to the development of other strands in translation studies trajectory, interest in the line of research on subtitling for the deaf and the hard of hearing is relatively recent, but promising. As a branch from subtitling studies, the studies on subtitling for the deaf and the hard of hearing, still in primeval development, rely heavily on research conducted in the subarea of subtitling aimed at hearing viewers. These researches have analyzed various technical and textual issues involved in subtitling, not enough attention, though, has been drawn to the issue of segmentation. Affiliated to this research strand, the present study investigates relevant discussion points in the area, focusing specifically on the examination of line-breakings adopted in the subtitling aimed at hearing viewers and in the subtitling for the deaf and the hard of hearing elaborated in Brazilian Portuguese for the movie Irmãos de Fé, directed by Moacyr Góes, and released as well as distributed in 2004 by Columbia Pictures. One of the research questions that motivated the study promote the examination of the criteria that may guide decision making regarding subtitles line-breaking, in those cases where linguistic considerations were ignored. The other research question is whether subtitling for the deaf and the hard of hearing shows more linguistic deviations than subtitling aimed at hearing viewers, due to the need of transmitting additional non-verbal information on the screen. The paucity of research in the area, especially on the aspect of segmentation justifies this study. The theoretical framework is that of Corpus-based Translation Studies in interface with Audiovisual Translation Studies (Kalantzi, 2008); it also consists of the description developed by Lemle (1989) of Brazilian Portuguese syntagmas to inform the tracking of line-break categories. The methodological procedures include quantitative data extracted with the software Wordsmith Tools© 5.0, manual annotation and tracking of segmentation categories. The results reveal the subtitlers preference for the transcription of a great amount of speech onto the screen, called verbatim subtitling. Line-break tracking shows that linguistic deviations were more frequent in the verb phrase, and that in this corpus the preference for a shorter upper line is the most influential factor that competes with linguistic considerations in subtitle segmentation. Few occurrences of different line breaking choices were found between subtitling modalities, none of which could be assigned to peculiarities of the type of subtitling involved in those occurrences. The results point out that, in general, there are not significant differences between both subtitling modalities either in technical or textual terms, and that both received the same treatment from the subtitler.