Subtitling, semiotics and "Spirited Away"

When translating a film according to typical subtitling models, the focus is usually solely on the dialogue of the film. Furthermore, the resulting translations are often impoverished to a large extent due to the constraints of the medium. The combined effects of this result in a significant loss of equivalence between the subtitles and the original linguistic and extralinguistic information. A potential method of preventing this loss is the application of a semiotic model for translation during the subtitling process. To this end, an existing model for the semiotranslation of film was enhanced and applied to the subtitling of the wildly popular Japanese animated film "Spirited Away" (2001). The resulting subtitles were evaluated for equivalence with the source text (ST) against the existing subtitle track that was distributed on a DVD release of the film. It was found that much more information, both from dialogue and on-screen extralinguistic content, could be conveyed by the semiotic subtitles than those created following more traditional subtitling norms.