Title
Subtitling for the d/deaf and the hard-of-hearing (children!)
Conference name
EST Congress 2013
City
Country
Germany
Modalities
Date
29/08/2013-01/09/2013
Abstract
Audiovisual products are about a dialectic relation between the producer and the receiver. Decoding the information conveyed by the former through multiple channels, such as speech, sound and image, is a complex process. So it is, also, for people with hearing impairment, as they might not have total access to two out of the three key elements that build the message: speech and sound/music. Subtitling for the d/Deaf and the Hard-of-Hearing (onwards SDH) was born in the late seventies in the UK as a tool for deaf viewers to access, and therefore to enjoy, all kinds of audiovisual products. Thanks to SDH, subtitles not only account for speech, but also for other extralinguistic features, such as sound effects, tone and rhythm or music. Although speech can be understood as the way audiovisual contents are transmitted, sounds or music also help to build the message and can become even more meaningful than words. According to Kerner (1989) sounds and mu- sic stimulate reality, create illusion or suggest mood. The emergence of SDH was boosted by the European Year of People with Disabilities (2003), which contributed towards the reinforcement of accessibility to the media. As a result of this, the past few years have witnessed a gradual increase in the amount of SDH offered by television channels as well as studies based on this issue.
Broadcasters have devised their own conventions to carry out SDH, while researchers have focused their attention on this new discipline. In addition to the academic world, SDH has also been the centre of various pieces of legislation, especially in Europe. The most significant legislation in force is the Written Declaration on the subtitling of all public-service television programmes in the EU (European Parliament, 12 November 2007), which ensures that all “citizens have equal access to information, education and culture” and has contributed to devise various sets of guidelines on the way audiovisual materials should be accessible.
Thus, by law, all people with any degree of hearing loss must have complete access to audiovisual materials. However, it is especially noteworthy both the dearth of studies in how best to serve the heterogeneous deaf audience, and the scarcity of research focusing on extralinguistic elements conveyance in SDH practices.
Therefore, the interest in visual re-encoding of aural messages is sparked by the limited literature in existence on AVT focusing on a factor of an utmost importance in SDH, such as the conveyance of extralinguistic elements. Up until now, most of the research has tackled this issue from a general and descriptive perspective, mainly accounting for the linguistic issues involved in the subtitling process, such as editing, segmentation or the preference for verbs rather than nouns, to name but a few. Also, to date, very little research has focused exclusively on subtitling for deaf children, combining both Deaf Studies with AVT studies. Hence, the object of this study, i.e. extralinguistic information conveyance within current subtitles in children’s programmes, has received no attention so far.
Consequently, current SDH guidelines do not provide much information on how to provide deaf children with accessible subtitles, since they have been devised based on a general view of deafness and the deaf community. Three are the main sets of guidelines and codes of good SDH practices relevant to this study: on the one hand, in the UK context the ITC Guidance on Standards for Subtitling (1999), and the BBC Online Subtitling Editorial Guidelines V1.1 (2009) have been devised. On the other, there is the Spanish Norma UNE 153010. Subtitulado para personas sordas y personas con discapacidad auditiva. Subtitulado a través del teletexto (2003).
The English ones contain a section specifically devoted to deaf children, although they only touch upon linguistic issues, such as whether or not reduce long sentences, omit difficult words or simplify grammatical structures. They also provide recommendations on synchronising subtitles in time with the utterance. However, regarding extralinguistic elements, they only focus on formatting specifications, such as subtitles’ colour and background, typography or subtitle’s position within the screen. In other words, they mainly concentrate on subtitles’ legibility; that is subtitles’ visibility. Unlike the English sets of norms, the Spanish Norma UNE 153010 (2003) provides only a limited amount of advice related to subtitling for children, mainly in the section dealing with sound effects. It states that it is advisable to use both sound description and onomatopoeia when subtitling children’s programmes. Despite being insufficient, this recommendation is more focused on the other major SDH feature (Gambier 2003: 179), which is readability, i.e. subtitles’ comprehension. Readability is, thus, an essential feature to ensure that deaf children have access to the intended message of the audiovisual material. However, in order to provide accessible subtitles, it is necessary to know the audience they are targeted at.
Deaf audience is not a homogenous being. Deaf children’s needs and abilities differ from those of adults due to their age, maturity, language appreciation and reading skills. In fact, many factors come in to play when determining children’s deafness. Depending on the type, deafness can be either permanent or transitory; depending on the degree, it will allow the child to perceive sounds or not; and, depending on the vital period in which deafness appears, the child would have been able to access to oral language and sounds naturally. The latter will have a direct impact on the child’s communication approach (oral language/sign language), which, in turn, will affect the child’s intellectual development and social interaction. Undeniably, the combination of these factors results in an extremely heterogeneous audience with different needs and abilities among them. SDH subtitles are supposed to bridge the gap between deaf children and the information conveyed through the auditory channel of audiovisual products, which are initially conceived for a hearing audience. However, this is not an easy task. SDH faces two major difficulties: a) it has to describe sounds that might have never been heard or perceived by the target audience and b) it has to render these sounds by means of a language that is not always the target audience’s mother tongue, which will have an effect on subtitles’ reception. Previous research has shown evidence that the different approaches taken in children’s programmes to communicate aural information visually lack consistency due to the absence of recommendations on subtitling for deaf children. Existing SDH guidelines and recommendations, thus, should be developed in this respect. This presentation attempts to provide the first results/conclusions of my research on accessible subtitles provided in children’s programmes. The goal is no other than contributing towards the improvement of the quality of accessible audiovisual materials, which sometimes have suffered from the implementation of laws that aim at quantity only (Remael, 2007:26).
Broadcasters have devised their own conventions to carry out SDH, while researchers have focused their attention on this new discipline. In addition to the academic world, SDH has also been the centre of various pieces of legislation, especially in Europe. The most significant legislation in force is the Written Declaration on the subtitling of all public-service television programmes in the EU (European Parliament, 12 November 2007), which ensures that all “citizens have equal access to information, education and culture” and has contributed to devise various sets of guidelines on the way audiovisual materials should be accessible.
Thus, by law, all people with any degree of hearing loss must have complete access to audiovisual materials. However, it is especially noteworthy both the dearth of studies in how best to serve the heterogeneous deaf audience, and the scarcity of research focusing on extralinguistic elements conveyance in SDH practices.
Therefore, the interest in visual re-encoding of aural messages is sparked by the limited literature in existence on AVT focusing on a factor of an utmost importance in SDH, such as the conveyance of extralinguistic elements. Up until now, most of the research has tackled this issue from a general and descriptive perspective, mainly accounting for the linguistic issues involved in the subtitling process, such as editing, segmentation or the preference for verbs rather than nouns, to name but a few. Also, to date, very little research has focused exclusively on subtitling for deaf children, combining both Deaf Studies with AVT studies. Hence, the object of this study, i.e. extralinguistic information conveyance within current subtitles in children’s programmes, has received no attention so far.
Consequently, current SDH guidelines do not provide much information on how to provide deaf children with accessible subtitles, since they have been devised based on a general view of deafness and the deaf community. Three are the main sets of guidelines and codes of good SDH practices relevant to this study: on the one hand, in the UK context the ITC Guidance on Standards for Subtitling (1999), and the BBC Online Subtitling Editorial Guidelines V1.1 (2009) have been devised. On the other, there is the Spanish Norma UNE 153010. Subtitulado para personas sordas y personas con discapacidad auditiva. Subtitulado a través del teletexto (2003).
The English ones contain a section specifically devoted to deaf children, although they only touch upon linguistic issues, such as whether or not reduce long sentences, omit difficult words or simplify grammatical structures. They also provide recommendations on synchronising subtitles in time with the utterance. However, regarding extralinguistic elements, they only focus on formatting specifications, such as subtitles’ colour and background, typography or subtitle’s position within the screen. In other words, they mainly concentrate on subtitles’ legibility; that is subtitles’ visibility. Unlike the English sets of norms, the Spanish Norma UNE 153010 (2003) provides only a limited amount of advice related to subtitling for children, mainly in the section dealing with sound effects. It states that it is advisable to use both sound description and onomatopoeia when subtitling children’s programmes. Despite being insufficient, this recommendation is more focused on the other major SDH feature (Gambier 2003: 179), which is readability, i.e. subtitles’ comprehension. Readability is, thus, an essential feature to ensure that deaf children have access to the intended message of the audiovisual material. However, in order to provide accessible subtitles, it is necessary to know the audience they are targeted at.
Deaf audience is not a homogenous being. Deaf children’s needs and abilities differ from those of adults due to their age, maturity, language appreciation and reading skills. In fact, many factors come in to play when determining children’s deafness. Depending on the type, deafness can be either permanent or transitory; depending on the degree, it will allow the child to perceive sounds or not; and, depending on the vital period in which deafness appears, the child would have been able to access to oral language and sounds naturally. The latter will have a direct impact on the child’s communication approach (oral language/sign language), which, in turn, will affect the child’s intellectual development and social interaction. Undeniably, the combination of these factors results in an extremely heterogeneous audience with different needs and abilities among them. SDH subtitles are supposed to bridge the gap between deaf children and the information conveyed through the auditory channel of audiovisual products, which are initially conceived for a hearing audience. However, this is not an easy task. SDH faces two major difficulties: a) it has to describe sounds that might have never been heard or perceived by the target audience and b) it has to render these sounds by means of a language that is not always the target audience’s mother tongue, which will have an effect on subtitles’ reception. Previous research has shown evidence that the different approaches taken in children’s programmes to communicate aural information visually lack consistency due to the absence of recommendations on subtitling for deaf children. Existing SDH guidelines and recommendations, thus, should be developed in this respect. This presentation attempts to provide the first results/conclusions of my research on accessible subtitles provided in children’s programmes. The goal is no other than contributing towards the improvement of the quality of accessible audiovisual materials, which sometimes have suffered from the implementation of laws that aim at quantity only (Remael, 2007:26).