ABSTRACT
Subtitling has its origins in the practice of inserting intertitles in silent cinema. Intertitles were displayed between film shots and used to facilitate the narrative through continuity titles, which provided information about the events displayed, such as date and location, and to represent human speech through spoken titles, i.e. titles that represented spoken dialogue. Research on interlingual subtitling began in the 1980s and intensified in the mid-1990s. The bulk of published research in this area aims to describe and assess the representational function of subtitles, namely, how the content and features of film dialogue have been conveyed, how the cultures and identities featured in a programme or film have been portrayed through the subtitles, and whether the perceived intentions of the filmmakers have been served. Non-representational approaches to the study of interlingual subtitling and other modes of audiovisual translation draw on insights from critical theory, affect theory and post-structuralism.
