34
35 multinational translation company BTI in October 2012. Until October 2012, Emmerdale was subtitled from English to Finnish by a team of in-house or freelance translators working directly for the channel MTV, whereas the later episodes until the present have been translated by freelance translators subcontracted by BTI. My observations triggered my interest and inspired me to study the subtitles and the working conditions of translators more closely.
Another reason why the subtitles of this particular series were chosen as the research material was the language. A regular viewer of the series might think that subtitling a daily soap opera such as Emmerdale is easy and effortless but as Kaarina Suvanto, a former
translator of MTV and one of the founding members of Suomen Emmerdale Club, points out, it can be very challenging at times (Nikkemedia: http://www.nikkemedia.fi/kaarina/, accessed 11 April 2016). Suvanto translated Emmerdale for MTV for over ten years, and she has listed some of the issues of subtitling the series on her website (Nikkemedia:
http://www.nikkemedia.fi/kaarina/, accessed 11 April 2016). One of the main issues arises from cultural differences. For instance, as simple a word as ‘a barn’ can be a tricky term to translate as it can mean anything from an outbuilding of a farm (in Finnish “maatalon ulkorakennus”) to a shelter for animals (in Finnish “navetta”) or a hay barn (in Finnish
“heinälato”).
In addition, the colloquial language poses challenges in subtitling Emmerdale. One of the important characteristics of Emmerdale is sociolect which is the dialect of a particular social class (Yule 2006: 206) and different regional dialects. It has been studied that social class affects language in various ways (see for example Labov 1966; Trudgill 1974).
According to Yule (2006: 206), members of the working class tend to speak less standard language, while the middle classes tend to speak a more standard and formal language. Yule (2006: 206) separates these two classes in the following way. Middle class consists of those
“who have more years of education and perform non-manual work” while working class consists of those “who have fewer years of education and perform manual work of some kind” (Yule 2006: 206). What separate the speech of these classes from one another are features of pronunciation, words and structures. Some features are regularly used in one form by working-class speakers and some in another form by middle-class speakers. Based on my own observations as a viewer, in Emmerdale, the speech of the lower social classes,
especially one particular family, the Dingles, has been distinguished from the speech of the other characters by using several colloquial elements in the subtitles. In the subtitles of previous episodes, sociolect has been established, for instance, by using the pronoun “se” (in
36 English “it”) when referring to humans, passive verb with first-person plural, as in “me
mennään” (instead of standard Finnish equivalent “me menemme”), and by dropping off vowels and consonants from inflicted verb forms, for instance “ollu”, “sanonu”, “vois” and
“meen” (for more on translating sociolect in Emmerdale see Knuutinen 2001). Suvanto (Nikkemedia: http://www.nikkemedia.fi/kaarina/suomentaminen.htm, accessed 11 April 2016) notes that while the number of characters in the series increases, so does the number of different regional dialects. Thus, it becomes even more difficult to distinguish different dialects from one another by using natural colloquial Finnish. Due to these special
characteristics of the language in Emmerdale, it will be interesting to analyse the subtitles and to see whether the translation errors are in any way linked to the characteristics that make Emmerdale a complex series to subtitle.
The research material consists of the subtitles of twenty episodes of Emmerdale broadcast on MTV from November 2011 to May 2013. The episodes were selected randomly from that time period. The first set of ten episodes was translated by a team of three in-house or freelance translators working directly for MTV and these episodes were aired between November 2011 and April 2012. The second set of ten episodes was translated by a team of five freelance translators subcontracted by BTI and these episodes were aired between January 2013 and May 2013. The research material, including both the target language subtitles and the original dialogue, has been transcribed manually from the selected episodes of Emmerdale. This method of collecting material was occasionally extremely
time-consuming and wearisome. Additionally, transcribing the original dialogue without a script was quite difficult at times as other background noises in the series interfered with hearing what the characters were saying. As discussed in Chapter 2.3., the changing working conditions sometimes forces the translators to subtitle television programmes directly from the soundtrack on to the screen without a script (Abdallah 2007: 276). After transcribing the original dialogue manually and with nothing else to rely on than my own hearing, I can understand why translators might be more prone to make mistakes when translating without a script. Furthermore, the episodes and their subtitles were chosen randomly within a quite long time period, which could mean that the few episodes merely happened to represent a better or a worse sample of the material. The material may still give indications of possible trends. In order to acquire a more accurate and thorough understanding of subtitling quality of
Emmerdale, a more consistent sample of material should be collected. Lastly, it is necessary to address my relationship with Emmerdale. As Tuominen (2013: 21) points out, a qualitative study that is largely based on interpretation cannot ever be truly objective. Being a long-term
37 follower of Emmerdale, I am connected to the series on a personal level and my first and foremost desire is to see my favourite television programme subtitled as perfectly as possible.
I have followed the series for over 10 years which, I think, makes me something of an expert on the series Even though I do not consider my relationship with Emmerdale to be parasocial (see Hietala 2007 in Introduction), I do have some sort of personal attachment to the series which might affect my positioning as an evaluator. My personal attachment to the series might mean that my subjectivity becomes visible at times but those cases will be separately addressed when necessary.
38