The Pros and Cons of Using Templates in Subtitling

Abstract

According to Bywood et al. (forthcoming), ‘[t]he subtitling industry has experienced many seismic shifts in the course of the past three decades. The first of these was the cable and satellite TV revolution in the late 1980s which greatly increased the amount of content to be subtitled for television viewers across the globe’. One of the consequences of these shifts is the use of templates which, according to Georgakopolou (2012), were widely introduced because of the DVD boom in the late 1990s. She defines a template as ‘a subtitle file consisting of the spotted subtitles of a film done in the SL [Source Language], usually English, with specific settings in terms of words per minute and number of characters in a row, which is then translated into as many languages as necessary’ (Georgakopolou 2003: 220). In a similar vein, Díaz Cintas and Remael (2007: 253) define a subtitling template as ‘a list of master (sub)titles with the in and out times already spotted’. These definitions suggest that the technical task known as spotting or time-cueing (i.e. deciding the ‘in’ and ‘out’ times of subtitles, taking into account spatial and temporal constraints) may be conducted by a person other than the translator.