ABSTRACT
Subtitling is sometimes accused of being an impoverished language form because of the linguistic straightjacket imposed on it. In fact, subtitling 'tricks' do not really exist: subtitlers come up with solutions whenever they are confronted with a challenging dialogue or scene and some of the challenges appear to recur. Actually, syntactic-semantic and rhetorical segmentation overlap to some extent since the linguistic and paralinguistic features of speech usually collaborate. Good rhetorical segmentation helps convey surprise, suspense, irony, hesitation, etc. A careful segmentation of the information can help reinforce coherence and cohesion in subtitling. The translational shift becomes less striking, and textual cohesion is maintained when the dialogue is heard, and read, in context. It was Gutt who first applied the theory of relevance, itself largely the work of Sperber and Wilson, to the theory of translation. Kovacic found the approach was quite useful for analyzing and explaining the logic of subtitling omissions, which cannot simply be put down to linguistic factors.
