79
80 Abdallah’s (2007; 2012b) three-dimensional quality model and reception studies could
provide a solution for this. By defining quality collectively, the differing quality standards of various actors could be aligned and it could become easier to carry out measures of quality control (Abdallah 2012b: 37). Through reception studies it could be possible to examine whether the errors that are evaluated as major errors by language expert would be as serious to regular viewer’s mind. With regard to the present study, one way of examining what elements in subtitles attract the viewers’ attention would be to look at the discussions on subtitles in the Facebook groups mentioned in Chapter 4 which have been formed by and for fans of Emmerdale.
Thirdly, as O’Brien (2012: 55) points out, the quality evaluation models used in the translation industry do not take into consideration “variables such as content type,
communicative function, end user requirements, context, perishability, or mode of translation creation”. This study as well gave indications that “one size does not fit all” and in order to provide a more dynamic approach to quality evaluation, the error categorisations for subtitling should be adjusted to fit the data in terms of genre, text and content type. Abdallah (2007:
285) correctly argues that once the translators know how quality is defined in each commission, it becomes easier to proportion the time and effort used to complete the job.
Additionally, by adjusting the error categorisation to fit the data might also reduce the subjectivity of the assessment. Lastly, more attention should be paid on customer opinion, which in this case is the opinion of the viewers. One option to do this is by customer feedback where the translation company providing the subtitles could take into account the number of complaints received as a measure of translation quality. Here again the need for reception studies arises. This kind of way to improve product quality by customer feedback from the viewers would be in line with the TQM model (see Chapter 3.2.) presented by Chiaro (2008).
This study evaluated subtitling quality by analysing translation errors. As my research material, I analysed the subtitles of twenty episodes of the British soap opera Emmerdale. The first ten episodes were translated by three MTV’s former in-house
translators and the latter ten by five Broadcast Text International’s freelance translators. The results show that the subtitles of Emmerdale contained a total of 167 translation errors. The quantitative analysis revealed that the most common type of translation error was a linguistic error. The qualitative analysis, in turn, revealed that punctuation errors were the most typical representatives of translation errors in this set of data. This set of data gives slight indications that the subtitling quality of Emmerdale has changed afterthe outsourcing of translation activities to a multinational translation company, which can be detected as the increase in the
81 number of translation errors. The subtitles translated by MTV’s former in-house translators contained 61 translation errors, whereas the subtitles translated by BTI’s freelance translators contained 106 errors. The differences in the number of translation errors could be to some extent explained by the working conditions of the translators (Abdallah 2007; 2012a, Laine 2007) and the results support Kurvi’s (2013) and Hietamaa’s (2012) findings that poor working conditions affect subtitling quality. However, I have no personal knowledge of translators’ working conditions and therefore the influence of other factors, such as the professionalism and experience of the translators and their knowledge of the series and its characters, cannot be completely excluded.
The main focus of this study was to assess the usability of error analysis in the quality assessment of subtitles. The purpose was not to provide a thorough quality evaluation model but to test if a quality evaluation model which is in active use in the field of
professional translation would provide a suitable method to the subtitling industry as well.
The technical restrictions of subtitling and the subjectivity of assessment were the main challenges in classifying errors in the framework offered by this quality evaluation model. In addition, it was found that this particular model do not take into account variables, such as genre, text or content type, and in order to provide a more dynamic quality evaluation model that caters better for subtitling, the company-specific guidelines and conventions should be known and the error categorisation should be adjusted to fit the data.
82
References
Research material
Emmerdale episodes translated by former in-house and freelance translators of MTV recorded on 30th November 2011 (two episodes), 1st December 2011 (two episodes), 17th January 2012 (two episodes), 8th February 2012 (two episodes), and 18th April 2012 (two episodes).
Emmerdale episodes translated by the freelance translators of BTI recorded on 8th January 2013 (two episodes), 29th January 2013 (two episodes), 12th February 2013 (two episodes), 14th March 2013 (two episodes), and 1st May 2013 (two episodes).
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