Subtitling Brasilian telenovelas for Portuguese deaf audiences. An action reserarch project

SDH Subtitling for the Deaf and HoH was first introduced on Portuguese commercial television in 2003, with the offer of teletext subtitling on the Brazilian telenovela Mulheres Apaixonadas. This would be done within an Action Research project which would bring together researchers, practitioners, providers and the Deaf community in a joint effort to find a suitable subtitling solution for the Portuguese context. Even though, at first sight, such subtitles could be considered straightforward intralingual subtitling, it proved to be an instance of intercultural transfer and an opportunity to question many of the premises of traditional intralinguistic SDH, given that the mediation in case meant taking a Brazilian audiovisual text into Portuguese written subtitles for a Deaf audience who read such subtitles as their second language.