UNIverse - Public Research Portal
Project cover

Screen-to-text: The pragmatics of subtitles, transcripts and written viewer comments

Research Project
 | 
01.01.2018
 - 31.01.2025

In this cumulative habilitation project, I offer a multi-perspective exploration of meaning-making through textual discourses that are directly informed by and oriented towards telecinematic artefacts, i.e. fictional films and television series. This includes interlingual and intralingual subtitles as a site of meaning for viewers, written comments from the perspective of fans, and transcription by scholars. The different screen-to-text discourses I explore share that they centre around a process of intersemiotic transfer from multimodal telecinematic discourse with spoken dialogue at its linguistic centre to a genre of written text that contributes to the individual and/or collaborative negotiation of meaning: The linguistic researcher employs transcription to highlight aspects of scholarly interest and make tangible the multimodal context in which conversation in film and television takes place; the subtitler translates meaning for a new target audience; the commenter contributes to collaborative negotiation of meaning by and for an international fan community. Part 1: Interlingual subtitles Interlingual subtitles are understood as a form of situated language use and a means of mediated communication, which is theorised from the point of view of audiences (rather than translators). The subtitled film is not primarily regarded as the product of a translation process, but as a particularly multimodal and collaborative artefact with a conglomerate authorship that is by definition multilingual and multicultural. Part 2: Intralingual subtitles Intralingual subtitles are understood either... as the separate communicative acts of subtitle writers who as agents offer their interpretation of the spoken source dialogue; as communication by characters and as an extension of the same ventriloquism effect that makes it possible to unite audible dialogue and visible character actions into a unified act of communication; as one of many voices at the disposal of the collective sender. These readings are not mutually exclusive, but subtitles can facilitate one of the readings through particular linguistic choices, whereas viewers' perspectives will also favour any of these readings Part 3: Transcription Scholarly transcripts are related to subtitles insofar as they are based on the same source text and include a similar transfer from speech to writing. I explore the impact transcription choices have on the potential of transcripts to make accessible and foreground particular pragmatic aspects of language. Crucially, this includes the transcription of subtitled film. I discuss different transcription conventions and their consequences for the representation of subtitled film and television. Part 4: Community subtitles and comments The last section is based on a corpus of comments viewers of Korean television Drama post while they are watching streams of episodes on Viki (K-TACC - K-drama Time Aligned Comment Corpus), on which I have been collaborating with Miriam Locher.

Publications

Locher, Miriam A. and Messerli, Thomas C. (2020) ‘Translating the other: Communal TV watching of Korean TV drama’, Journal of Pragmatics, 170, pp. 20–36. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2020.07.002.

URLs
URLs

Messerli, Thomas C. (2020) ‘Subtitled artefacts as communication - the case of Ocean’s Eleven’s Scene 12’, Perspectives, 28(6), pp. 851–863. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/0907676x.2019.1704805.

URLs
URLs

Messerli, Thomas C. (2020) ‘Ocean’s Eleven’s Scene 12 - Lost in Transcription’, Perspectives, 28(6), pp. 837–850. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/0907676x.2019.1708421.

URLs
URLs

Messerli, Thomas C. (2019) ‘Subtitles and cinematic meaning-making: Interlingual subtitles as textual agents’, Multilingua, 38(5), pp. 529–546. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1515/multi-2018-0119.

URLs
URLs

Members (1)

Profile Photo

Thomas Messerli

Principal Investigator