Project Work Audiovisual Translation (MA)
(Design and evaluation of project work in the field of subtitling)
General information:
Language/ direction: chosen by students (recommended to be in their native language)
Videos: chosen by teachers, students have input on selection; entire videos or excerpts can be chosen. A video must be chosen for which (except in justified exceptional cases) no subtitles in the target language are available on the internet.
Translation assignment: formulated by teachers; contains precise information about the client, publication format, target audience, and reception context of the subtitles.
Deadline for submission: Teachers determine the deadline; three times per academic year, depending on the exam dates for specialized translation, followed by four weeks for grading.
Scope of the project: video of approx. 10 minutes duration in which there is continuous speech.
Submission format: srt file (optional: Word file with transcript of the original version and the translation – at the request of the examiner).
Weighting of subtitles and commentary in the overall grade: 80% of the grade for subtitles, 20% for commentary; both parts must be complete and positively evaluated; linguistic correctness of the commentary is also assessed
Pass level: 80% (for subtitles)
Assessment of the commentary
| parameter | points |
|---|---|
| 1. Identification of the two genre characteristics relevant to subtitling (examples of video genres: documentary, commercial, animated film, literary adaptation, sitcom, thriller) | 2/18 P. |
| 2. Your strategies for dealing with (media-independent) text-specific subtitling difficulties in the source video: Select two aspects of analysis (e.g., from the areas of language varieties, cultural references/specifics, culture-specific language conventions, wordplay, puns or situational comedy, linguistic idiosyncrasies of a speaker/character, mixture of several source languages). Explain your role in each film (excerpt) and the translation strategies you have chosen, illustrating their consistent application with two examples each. | 6/18 P. |
| 3. Influence of multimedia specifics of subtitling as a special form of audiovisual translation (co-presence of spoken source text and written target text as well as image, (sound) and text) on your translation decisions: Explain two translation strategies (e.g., in the areas of deixis, synchronization, handling of text insertions, song lyrics, literary quotations, etc.) that are conditioned by media co-presence in reception, using two examples each. | 4/18 P. |
| 4. Your strategies for complying with the technical requirements of subtitling (spatial and temporal restrictions, legibility): Explain two of the strategies you use (e.g., in the areas of text reduction, simplification, segmentation) using two examples each. | 4/18 P. |
| 5. Your research sources: For either analysis aspect 2 or analysis aspect 3, list two different research sources on which your choice of a specific or several related translation strategies in the selected area is based. Sources may include links to specific entries in high-quality online dictionaries or reputable reading sources (e.g., specialist articles, reliable information websites, text databases, printed literary texts). | 2/18 P. |
| Note: It is possible to (partly) use the same examples in points 2–4. In this case, it would be necessary to illustrate how a preliminary translation proposal develops into a final translation solution through the successive application of text-specific (2), media-specific (3), and technical (4) criteria. |
Grading scale for the commentary:
11–12 points | Sufficient
13–14 points | Staisfactory
15–16 points | Good
17–18 points | Very good
Subtitle evaluation:
Formal rules for subtitling
Display duration:
minimum: 1 second
maximum: 6 seconds
½ line: 1.5-2 seconds
1 line: 2.5-3 seconds
1.5 lines: 4-5 seconds
Mandatory interval between two subtitles:
0.2 seconds
Characters per line
Maximum 39 characters per line
Maximum 2 lines (= 78 characters) per subtitle
Maximum one speaker per line
Key for subtitles:
Subtitles are checked for usability (using the following error categories); the percentages in the table below refer to the number of usable subtitles
80% | Sufficient
85% | Satisfactory
90% | Good
95% | Very good
Punctuation
| Symbol | Use |
|---|---|
| - | Change of speaker (The dash is usually placed at the beginning of the second line and separated from the beginning of the sentence by a space. Sometimes both lines of dialogue begin with a dash.) |
| … | Pause, hesitation, stuttering, interruption, incomplete list (The three dots are placed at the end of a subtitle or at the beginning of the next subtitle. Sentences that extend beyond a subtitle are NOT marked with three dots.) |
| , . | Syntactic marking (with commas and periods) (Semicolons, on the other hand, should be avoided.) |
| : | Announcement of a list or explanation, a quotation, etc. |
| „ “ | Quotation, direct speech in speech, marking of rare proper names |
| CAPITAL LETTERS | Inscription, newspaper headline, sign, poster |
| Italics |
|
Additional punctuation rules
- No bold type, no underlining, no coloured highlighting of individual words
- No round or square brackets
- Terms written out in full (euro, dollar, percent, etc.) instead of special characters (€, $, % etc.)
- No hyphenation