As part of a documentary production course at a Japanese university, the student participants of this study interview people at work in their native language and then translate the interviews, adding these translations to the final product as English subtitles. This is known as reverse subtitling in the audiovisual translation (AVT) field. Since the students have to wear many hats, including as filmmakers, interviewers, video editors and translators, they are deeply involved in the whole process and are personally invested in ensuring that their individual documentaries are accessible to a global audience. In past iterations of the course, the syllabus included guidance on how to create content, and how to handle the camerawork, but the students were essentially on their own when it came to translating the interviews. Although previous feedback indicated that the subtitling task helped them to improve their writing ability, it was also a challenging experience; hence the need for a reverse subtitling module to be included in the course. The module will comprise various translation strategies, including machine translation (MT) rules such as pre- and post-editing. Pre-editing is necessary to clean up the source text before feeding it into the MT software; skipping this prepping stage will likely result in mistakes in the translated text. Similarly, post-editing helps to check the translated text for errors. The completed subtitling module with its incorporation of MT will be piloted in future courses in the hope that it will help to develop the students’ English writing skill.

Authors:
Khadijah Omar, Kyushu University, Japan

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Posted by Clive Staples Lewis

Last updated: 2023-02-23 23:45:00

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