Title
Text reduction techniques in theatre translation. A case study of surtitles for La Traviata
Author(s)
Conference name
Intermedia. 5th International Conference on Audiovisual Translation
City
Modalities
Keywords
Date
19/09/2019
Abstract
The emergence of audiovisual translation (AVT) was a means to facilitate the communication, to adapt audiovisual products to foreign audiences, to eliminate language barriers. Surtitling, one of the translation modes, facilitates the intelligibility of stage production, allows theatres to enlarge their audiences. Since surtitles deal with live production, they are constrained by time and space and the surtitler’s utmost purpose is to render the translated text in short.

The presentation aims at analysis of the text reduction/compression instances, which involves leaving out the target text elements present in the source text to retain the content of the words rather than preserve the structural adequacy of the text format, at word and sentence levels applied in the Lithuanian surtitles of the Act I of the opera La Traviata. The degree of compression is constantly increasing in contemporary translations; especially it is obvious in theatre and music translation due the necessity to convey informational content quickly.

The analysis reveals that many cases of text compression appear due to the linguistic peculiarities of the languages. In the Lithuanian surtitles, text compression strategies regarding word level mostly include omission. Text compression at the sentence level has been observed less frequently. In a number of cases, the surtitles contained more than one strategy of text compression. Thus, the combination of a few strategies in one surtitle has been fairly often employed.
Submitted by Anita Fidyka on Wed, 18/09/2019 - 15:50