Subtitling in Romania

Romania is traditionally a subtitling country where most of the foreign-language audiovisual material is viewed in the original audio version with Romanian subtitles. In spite of the lack of regulatory provisions concerning the sector of audiovisual translations, in the last years there have been imposed specific obligations for childrens programmes which have to be dubbed into Romanian. Although both subtitling and dubbing have advantages and disadvantages, it is interesting to see how the countries where people are used to see subtitles would generally prefer them to dubbing and the countries that use dubbing consider it a better option than subtitles. It may be only a question of habit, but most Romanians prefer subtitling to dubbing, one of the most invoked reasons being the aspect of language acquisition. But is this reason really consistent? Audiovisual translation is divided into intralingual and interlingual. While in the first case the source language and the target language are the same, being used in live subtitling and surtitling for the opera and theatre, subtitling for the hearing impaired and audio description for the blind, in the case of interlingual translations, films and TV programmes are translated to foreign languages. The interlingual translations can be either visual (subtitling), or aural (revoicing - lipsynchronised dubbing- , voice-overs or narration). The development of the film industry and the start of television broadcasting led to the increasing need of incorporating subtitles or dubbing films. Ivarsson (2002) describes the stages of the subtitling history from their predecessors, the intertitles (the short texts inserted between the sequences of a silent film). Ever since, the insertion of subtitles has been improved by scientists from several European countries and, following the advances in the computer
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technology and with the help of subtitling programmes, nowadays translators alone are able to carry out the entire process of subtitling. On the other hand, the history of dubbing differs from one country to another. The reasons that influenced the choice of dubbing over subtitling in many of countries were political, economical, but also social and cultural and, in general, this choice was adopted for both cinema and television. The cultural and language policy of the 1930s in countries with nationalist regimes, the standardization of the language, the promotion of linguistic unity, the existence of a potentially large market for the talking films (following the silent movies), speaking the same language as the neighboring countries that had began using dubbing or the great level of illiteracy at that time ( the 1930s) were the main factors that led to the choice of dubbing in countries like Italy, Spain, Germany, France or Austria. Countries that chose subtitling had opposite reasons: small cinema markets, the lack of a nationalist language policy. Nowadays the audiovisual translation methods most widely used in the EU countries are dubbing and subtitling. Dubbing means the post-production replacement of the soundtrack with a new one in the target language. Dubbing, also known as rerecording, is the post-production process, used in filmmaking and video production, in which vocal recording (like dialogue) occurs subsequent to the original recording stage. The term most commonly refers to the substitution of the voices of the actors shown on the screen by those of different performers speaking a different language; however the practice also involves the rerecording of audio segments and then synchronizing the recording with the existing footage. (Wikipedia) According to erban (2004), dubbing has the advantages of not distracting attention from the image and it is considered better for children and people with poor reading skills, although it has much higher production costs than subtitling, it takes more time and the original soundtrack is lost. Though it seems more natural to replace speech by speech, as one gets used to watching movies in the original version, the dubbed voices are separated from the gestures and faces on the screen and they never create an entirely natural impression. On the other hand, subtitles are lines of text, written versions of the soundtrack (usually in two rows, shown together with the image, near the bottom of the picture).
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Subtitles are textual versions of the dialog or commentary in films, television programs, video games, and the like, usually displayed at the bottom of the screen. They can either be a form of written translation of a dialog in a foreign language, or a written rendering of the dialog in the same language, with or without added information to help viewers who are deaf and hard-of-hearing to follow the dialog, or people who cannot understand the spoken dialogue or who have accent recognition problems. (Wikipedia) Subtitling has the advantage of being less expensive than dubbing, and the whole process of subtitling can be nowadays carried out by the translator alone with the help of subtitling programmes and without taking a very long time. This type of audiovisual translation is better for the deaf or hard-of-hearing, for immigrants or tourists (erban 2004). Subtitles are thought to have a role in language learning, although not many studies have been made so far in this respect. The drawbacks would be that the viewers attention is split between image, soundtrack and subtitles and part of the information gets lost, but also the time and space constraints and the challenges of transposing speech in written text, transferring swear word, slang, dialects or accents. The preference for dubbing or subtitling depends mostly on the tradition established in each country. Of course, the choice of language transfer practices differs between inhabitants of large cities and those living in smaller cities, between students and people who have not attended university, between people who speak one or more foreign languages and those who speak only their mother tongue. In Europe, movies distributed in theaters are typically subtitled. The exception to this is represented by those countries that have traditionally chosen to adopt dubbing as their main means of translation. The countries that historically have adopted dubbing over subtitling are Germany, Spain, France and even more so in Italy, where practically every foreign film or animated production is dubbed into Italian. However, the trend is clearly changing, as even those countries that traditionally have always opted for dubbing are moving towards subtitling, leaving behind the more costly and technically timeconsuming dubbing. Dubbing is more popular, although more expensive, in countries where there is a majority of single language speaking communities and also in wealthier countries.(Riggio 2010, pp.32-33)

More and more countries today adopt subtitling or dubbing, according to whether it is for TV programming or theatrical release. According to Josephine Dries, in mid90s Romania was subtitling all foreign films and 90% of the foreign television programmes (Dries 1995). Since 1995, when the movie Babe (Chris Noonan 1995) was dubbed in Romanian for the cinema release, there have been other attempts of introducing professional dubbing. Dubbing could help minimize the level of borrowed English words (anglicisms). Yet, in 2007 when Cartoon Network decided to start dubbing, parents, teachers and children revolted and started a petition asking the government to intervene and stop the so-called devastating effect of dubs upon childrens foreign language skills. The general opinion is that the exposure to foreign-language programmes from an early age is beneficial in the language education process. This is a reason why most Romanians are against dubbing. But the learning process involves many factors and it is not necessarily true that those who prefer a film in the original language (either subtitled or not) end up learning more foreign languages. It is rather the other way around those who have a certain knowledge of a foreign language prefer either the original version or the one subtitled (in their mother language or with an intralingual subtitle). In this case of watching the subtitled film and listening to the original soundtrack, thus enabling the source material to remain intact, not only can one better appreciate the entire audiovisual work, but also acquire foreign language skills. Language acquisition takes place when two languages, of which one is mastered and the other is at least familiar, are used alternately and with the same content. That means that an increased use of subtitling instead of dubbing in Europe could lead to an increased understanding of languages throughout Europe, and thus to a better understanding between European people.(Borell 2000, p.16) The EU Commission encourages contact with languages and language learning and promotes linguistic diversity. In 2007, the European Commissioner responsible for Multilingualism, Leonard Orban, addressed the Culture Committee, encouraging subtitling as a good practice for foreign-language learning: You know that in some countries films in cinema and television are subtitled, other countries have the tradition that you listen just to your mother tongue. It is suggested, and I personally agree from experience, to the argument that especially young people in
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countries where subtitling is used usually have better abilities to learn languages. I wish to engage in a dialogue with all Member States and obviously this Parliament about how increased subtitling could be encouraged. Why should we leave out the chance for probably the cheapest language school one could imagine? (Orban 2007, p.3) A real advantage of watching subtitled films is the potential language acquisition, but this is only valid in the case of those already studying that foreign language. For those, it can prove efficient in developing vocabulary and learning to reuse it in proper context or improving pronunciation. While the exposure to foreign languages is always beneficial when trying to learn a new language, the general distaste for dubbed films or TV programmes and the preference for subtitling in Romania is mostly due to habituation, as it is the case of most European countries, either subtitling or dubbing countries. The habituation to a certain method of language transfer created patterns of choice, this being the main reason Romanians prefer subtitling.

References Dries, Josephine (1995). Breaking Language Barriers behind the Broken Wall (Voice-over, Dubbing or Sub-titling?). Intermedia, 22.6, pp. 3537. Ivarsson, Jan (2002). Subtitling Through the Ages. A Technical History of Subtitles in Europe. Language International, pp. 6 10. Orban, Leonard (2007). Multilingualism is in the genetic code of the Union. Speech/07/104 Brussels. http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_SPEECH-07-104_en.htm (accessed on 03.03.2013) Riggio, Francesca (2010). Dubbing vs. Subtitling. MultiLingual. pp 31-35. erban, Adriana (2004). Introduction to Audiovisual Translation. University of Leeds. http://ics.leeds.ac.uk/papers/llp/exhibits/16/IntroAVTranslation_Adriana_Serban.ppt Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubbing_(filmmaking) (accessed on 02.03.2013) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subtitle_(captioning) (accessed on 02.03.2013)