Applying Multimodal Transcription to Persian Subtitling
Applying Multimodal Transcription to Persian Subtitling

Summary/Abstract: Subtitling reduction is a way of tackling subtitling constraints that can facilitate the watching experience of the viewers. Recently, multimodal transcription has been employed by Taylor (2003, 2013) to investigate the audiovisual requirements of films as well as to investigate the possibility of editing and shortening the subtitles based on the nonverbally informed content. Since this approach has rarely been empirically examined, the current study attempted to investigate the possibility of reducing the subtitles of the French language film Amelie (Jeunet, 2001), and the impact of so doing on the comprehension achievement and the reception of the Iranian viewers. To this aim, in an experiment, the full Persian subtitles of the film were reduced based on the said framework. Then, the comprehension achievement of the control group who watched the full subtitles was compared with that of the experimental group who were shown the reducedsubtitles. Moreover, the reception of the reduced subtitles was qualitatively investigated using retrospective interviews with selected participants of the treatment group. The results of the experiment revealed no significant difference between the comprehension achievements of the two groups, indicating the adequacy of the reduced version of the subtitles. The interviews revealed mixed results, indicating that the reduced subtitles were well-received by some for their brevity, but they were also criticized by some others for their fairly negative interference with the watching flow.

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