Subtitling Strategies of Verbal-Visual Components in The Social Dilemma

Abstract

The widespread of technology and streaming platforms have highlighted the importance of audiovisual translation. Audiovisual materials consist of four components: verbal-acoustic, verbal-visual, nonverbal-visual, and nonverbal-acoustic. Subtitlers usually focus on rendering the verbal-acoustic component (i.e., the dialogue) and rarely focus on the verbal-visual component. Therefore, this article aims to identify the subtitling strategies used in rendering the verbal-visual components that are displayed simultaneously with the dialogue. The data are taken from the docudrama The Social Dilemma. Gottlieb’s (1992) typology is used to identify the applied subtitling strategies. The analysis demonstrates that the subtitler employed seven subtitling strategies: transfer, paraphrase, imitation, deletion, expansion, condensation, and resignation. Also, the results indicate that resignation was the most frequently used strategy. Finally, the study recommends that the subtitler considers all components in the subtitling process.