New doctoral thesis 2025 in Translation Studies: Style in subtitles

Fulltext in Publication database DiVA. Style in Subtitles: A Dialogical Approach to Characterisation in Subtitled Film and Television Drama

Style in Subtitles presents an exploration of stylistic meaning-making in subtitled film and television drama. It introduces a dialogical approach that envisages subtitles as meaning-making resources aimed at facilitating a fuller understanding of the dialogue-in-context. It thereby challenges the perception of subtitling as constrained translation, characterised by loss in relation to the dialogue, and instead suggests that subtitles are related to the audiovisual text in ways that both encompass and transcend the linguistic dimension.

Three style markers relevant to characterisation – punctuation marks, long and short word forms and address forms – are qualitatively and quantitatively investigated in a mixed methods design comprising three empirical studies. The material consists of fifteen film and television dramas subtitled by experienced professional subtitlers. The findings show how style marker choices shape textual features and in a versatile and context-dependent manner contribute to characterisation, albeit with different means than in the spoken dialogue and in continuous interaction with various aspects of the simultaneously present audiovisual source text.

1. The first study explores punctuation marks with a specific focus on exclamation marks. It suggests that a low average sentence length and a high share of tonal marks are typical features of film and television drama subtitles. However, the study also shows that punctuation texture is context-dependent and that punctuation mark choices contribute to characterisation in interaction with many other semiotic resources in the narrative context of the moving audiovisual text.
2. The second study investigates long and short forms of two Swedish indefinite pronouns. The findings indicate that word form choices are stylistically meaningful and contribute to highlight aspects of temporality, literacy/orality, emphasis and social relations/settings. Subtitle reading speed was not found to be a decisive factor for word form choices.
3. The third study presents a comprehensive investigation of address forms (vocatives and address pronouns). The results show a surprisingly similar, and relatively high, share of address forms between subtitles and corresponding dialogue. Pronominal T/V choices, which are unavailable in English, were found to enrich the subtitled target texts by foregrounding various aspects of character relations beyond those expressed in the spoken dialogue. 

The application of the dialogical approach shifts subtitles from being seen in terms of loss in relation to the dialogue, to recognizing their contributions to the dialogue-in-context. Furthermore, the empirical findings underline the importance of stylistic meaning-making for characterisation in film and television drama subtitles.