Irish-language subtitling from the mid-twentieth century to today

The question of subtitling and the Irish language has been very topical since the mid-1990s and the foundation of the Irish-language television channel Teilifís na Gaeilge, now known as TG4. The station was founded with the view that both English and Irish would be used as subtitling languages, though this has not proven to be the case over time. What is not well known is that Irish-language subtitling was tried long before the foundation of Teilifís na Gaeilge. In the late 1940s and in 1966, there were two early experiments in Irish-language subtitling. In 1947, Alexander Korda’s distribution company released the Italian feature film Roma città aperta (Rossellini 1945) with bilingual English and Irish subtitles. The film played intermittently at cinemas round the country until 1950. In November 1966, Ireland’s national television station, RTÉ, broadcast another Italian film, Ladri di biciclette (de Sica, 1948) with Irish-only subtitles. This unleashed a storm of protest which lasted several weeks, mostly played out in newspapers. Neither of these experiments was repeated. This paper draws on press and archival sources and research on language policy to tell the story of these two experiments and to analyse the range of positive and negative reactions among Irish and English speakers. It shows that the ventures failed for a range of reasons including language politics, lack of AVT expertise and the technologies of the day. It goes on to look at more recent developments in Irish-language subtitling to show how Irish-language subtitling is still at the ‘experimental’ stage and has not, to date, become firm policy. The paper ultimately argues for the importance of looking at historical developments in AVT to shed light on current and ongoing problems.