Now that aesthetic subtitling has been defined, we must raise the question of why it is worth considering at all. After all, the norms that have held sway for decades “have proved perfectly functional”(McClarty, 2014, p. 593), and producing aesthetic subtitles implies extra time, effort and, of course, money. However, these conventions do have their shortcomings, and the suggestion is that aesthetic subtitles could go some way to remedying those shortcomings. They also have the potential to provide a better experience for film audiences, which could justify the extra effort needed to produce them.
4.1. The Nature of the Film Text
The simple nature of film as a medium lends itself particularly well to a more visually adventurous approach to subtitling. Many scholars of subtitling in general remark on how complex film is as a text, made up as it is of different semiotic channels — including verbal and non-verbal, aural and visual — all of which combine to create the final thing (see Chaume, 2004 and Delabastita, 1989). However, Bogucki believes that to look at audiovisual texts and focus purely on the aural semiotic channel, ignoring the visual, is a mistake made by novices (Bogucki, 2015). While he was specifically referring to researchers, his is an opinion that could be extended to subtitling in general.
The main focus in subtitling is arguably the aural channel. Subtitles represent dialogue and, for the deaf and hard of hearing, sound effects and music. The sound is the most important. However, looking at film studies offers a different perspective. In her book Screen Language, Potter suggests that it is actually the sound that works with the image,
rather than the other way round, for harmony (or discord), clarification and intensity (2001). Metz, well-known for his work in film semiotics, believes that each frame is on its own a complete énoncé, in the Saussurian sense, capable of both denotative and connotative meaning through what is shot and the way in which it is shot (2003). He uses an example a dock that is photographed in the style of a noir film to illustrate this.
The denotative meaning is simply the dock itself, darkly lit, but the connotative meaning is the atmosphere created by that lighting choice, that brings to mind all the emotions and themes associated with film noir (Metz, 2003, p. 100). Whereas a novel can go on with pages and pages of lush, poetic description, a film provides a wealth of detail in the image, the director’s choices of how to film something generating meaning that could not be generated through action alone (Monaco, 2009).
Clearly, the visual code is so important when it comes to interpreting meaning in film that it cannot be disregarded. But in the world of subtitling, that is what has happened.
No-one so far has really concerned themselves with the real value of the visual semiotic channel of film as a source text. They simply acknowledge its existence and fervently insist on keeping out its way. But as Díaz Cintas and Remael rightly point out, subtitles need to “become part of [the film’s] semiotic system” and “must interact with and rely on all the film’s different channels” (Díaz Cintas & Remael, 2007, p. 45). If it is important for the source text (the film), then it should be equally important for the target text (the subtitles). As such, it makes perfect sense to thoroughly consider subtitle design and how it can be used to make them be part of, interact with, and rely on the image. As “a translator of poetry may produce poetry and a translator of theatre may produce theatre”, so could a translator of film produce film (McClarty, 2014, p.
598).
4.2. The Invisibility Paradox and Stylistic Synchronicity
Many of the current conventions for subtitling are based on the view that the ideal subtitles pass unnoticed. Thus they are devoid of elaborate design and positioned at the bottom of the screen, out of the way. However, Foerster points out that despite all this “subtitles have never been and will never be invisible” (2010, p. 83), a reality she terms the invisibility paradox (p.82). Indeed, the purpose of subtitles is for the
audience to see them and understand them (McClarty, 2014b). Otherwise they are just superfluous. What’s more, subtitles are not only visible, they are visibly a translation as the simultaneous presence of the source language serves as a constant reminder to the audience that they are watching a foreign product (Caffrey, 2009; Foerster, 2010).
This means that the presence of subtitles cannot, and should not, be denied. To do so would be foolish.
The invisibility paradox is very important for the argument supporting an aesthetic approach to subtitling. If assumed to be true, the counterargument that aesthetic subtitles are not invisible enough (and by implication too distracting) is no longer valid, as the same could be said of conventional subtitles anyway. This has led McClarty to believe that we should essentially give up on trying to make subtitles invisible, since it is impossible, and instead “[uphold] difference”, embracing their presence and their role as a translation (2014, p. 599). In doing so, the subtitler no longer needs to feel bound by aesthetic norms that attempt to downplay the subtitles’
presence, and so can be more adventurous in the design process (McClarty, 2014).
It could further be argued that the norms that claim to advocate invisibility actually, ironically enough, reinforce the invisibility paradox. The minimalist style that they encourage is often at odds with the aesthetic of a film, and this creates a bigger contrast between the subtitle and the image and draws attention to their alien-ness. So, the subtitles appear less like a part of the film and more like the blemish so many criticise them of being. The implication is, then, that aesthetic subtitles could go some way to helping resolve the subtitles-are-a-blemish argument. They can be adapted to the aesthetic of the film, thus “[achieving] a form of stylistic synchronicity with the film”
(McClarty, 2014, p. 599). This means that the subtitles would feel more like an integral part of the image, as if the filmmakers intended them to be there the whole time, and would create a more effective illusion of ‘invisibility’, despite being more visible than ever.
4.3. Translation Solutions
Nornes bemoans the domesticating tendencies of the translations of subtitles going so far as to call them violent and corrupt (McClarty, 2014; Nornes, 1999). Elsewhere, de
Linde and Kay worry that the frequent need to condense subtitles and restrict them to
“essential static information” (1999, p. 6) runs the risk of removing important linguistic and rhetorical devices. The aesthetic subtitler could use a subtitle’s design to “respond more accurately to the full spectrum of communicative codes offered by the film text”
(2014, p. 593) and help restore these elements that are ‘lost in translation’ (or perhaps more accurately in the case of subtitles, ‘lost in condensation’). For example, a word emphasised using repetition in the dialogue could be emphasized through font size or colour in its corresponding subtitle. Or perhaps the difference between “tu” and
“vous” in French, which indicate social distance — the former is more intimate than the latter, but both translate as “you” in English — could be reflected in the physical distance between two characters’ subtitles on screen. In the first example, de Linde and Kay would be satisfied to see that the rhetorical impact of the dialogue has been maintained. In the latter, Nornes would be pleased that the linguistic idiosyncrasy related to social distance in French has not been swept under the rug.
4.4. Audience Experience and Audience Behaviour
The audience is incredibly important in subtitling. They are its users and many subtitling norms have developed from attempting to determine their needs and abilities and the best ways to cater to them. But over time, as with all things, these needs and abilities have evolved. And, as has already been mentioned, judgements on an audience’s capabilities have been mostly founded through guesswork or assumptions rather than (reliable) empirical evidence (Künzli & Ehrensberger-Dow, 2011; Szarkowska & Gerber-Morón, 2018). Perhaps it is time for a new approach.
McClarty suggests that it is likely that audiences these days are more used to creative text on screen, and therefore are more able to cope with it (2014). This is especially plausible given the aforementioned rise of audiovisual content on social media, where more and more videos are subtitled, most likely in response to users wanting to watch videos but without the need to turn on the sound. As this trend continues, it could be that audiences do not just become more used to graphically sophisticated subtitles — they may even grow to expect them. Some translation researchers have gone to the extent of undertaking empirical studies that lean more towards cognitive psychology to determine the real abilities of an audience. Their compelling results suggest that
audiences are indeed a lot more capable than they have been given credit for in the past and that certain features of aesthetic subtitling are not as detrimental as its detractors fear. For example, Szarkowska and Gerber-Morón suggest that the six-second rule “is unnecessarily long for modern viewers” (2018, p. 26), who are not only capable of reading faster subtitles, but may be less satisfied with slower ones. Indeed, they do not seem to draw any advantage from slow subtitles in terms of comprehension or cognitive effort (Szarkowska & Gerber-Morón, 2018). With a direct link to aesthetic subtitling, Künzli and Ehrensberger-Dow also found that adding translator-note surtitles to a subtitled film did not negatively affect how the audience understood the film or how much of the image they remembered (2011). Overall, it suggests that subtitling guidelines, as they stand, and what an audience is truly capable of and truly needs, are in need of an update.
Aesthetic subtitles could also work with the audience and their natural behaviour when watching a film than traditional subtitles have so far. With any image, there are parts of it that a viewer’s eye is drawn to, either consciously or unconsciously (Monaco, 2009), and in film these parts are often key to narrative development (Bordwell &
Thompson, 2013). These findings in film studies correlate with those of Fox (2013), from which she develops the concepts of focus points and primary and secondary areas in a film frame (Fox, 2013). The results from her experiment showed that the eye trace for target language (TL) viewers watching aesthetic subtitles, that were positioned closer to primary focus points, was more like that of a native source language speaker, watching without subtitles, than TL viewers watching the same film with traditional subtitles. It implies that aesthetic subtitles have the potential to better follow the natural eye trace of an audience, as guided by the action and the mise-en-scene. This as opposed to traditional subtitles that, in an attempt to stay away from primary focus points, actually drag the eye physically away from them.
Aesthetic subtitles could even enhance a film for a foreign audience in the way that it
“[responds] more adequately to the full spectrum of communicative codes offered by the film text” (McClarty, 2014, p. 593). This is simply applying to subtitling the same philosophy of many film scholars that the cinematic codes of the image are just as important for communication and understanding in film (such as Monaco, 2009 and
Speidel, 2012). Diegetic aesthetic subtitles could be “an additional narrative device”
(McClarty, 2014, p. 599) that contributes extra layers of meaning to narrative themes and characterisation. Or stylistic subtitles, apart from being better integrated into the mise-en-scene, could simply be more pleasing to watch and contribute to an audience’s overall appreciation of a film.