ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the use and reception in subtitling of non-standard txt spellings. The research is motivated by the belief that, in interlingual subtitling – a physically constrained type of translation, in which the average viewer spends more than half of the subtitle display time ‘within an area . . . less than about 13 per cent of the movie scene’ (Goldstein et al. 2007: 960) – it is worth trying out shorter txt forms, which could potentially enable viewers to distribute their visual resources across more of the screen. The study is also motivated by the facts that communication is increasingly mediated by technology and that translation consumption patterns have changed with increased publication of translated products on the Internet. We thus argue that translators and subtitlers have to know how to accurately respond to these changes if they are to create adequate products for their target audiences.
