Screen Translation and Cultural Transfer: Subtitling in the Curriculum

Screen translation plays a key role in the global circulation of audiovisual productions between markets and cultures. This chapter starts with a brief overview of its origins in the late 1920s, and the market and legislative pressures which drive screen translation today. The challenges of its different intra- and inter-lingual modes are then outlined, including their ideological implications. An interdisciplinary methodology for describing the skopos of screen translations and the multimodal meanings found in them is put forward. Along with a consideration of professional codes of practice, this provides the foundation of a proposed group project designed to give students a flavour of the complexities of subtitling using a particualr freeware package, Learning via Subtitling (LvS)