ABSTRACT

Multilingual films do not always travel well across borders. When translated, multilingualism may become neutralised and washed out. In subtitling, multiple languages used in the original are usually not marked in any way in the target subtitles. This results in neutralisation and linguistic homogenisation, whereby target viewers may not even realise that different languages are spoken in the film. In this study, we test a new solution aimed to help preserve the multilingual nature of films in interlingual subtitling: the strategy of colour coding. To gauge the impact of colour coding on viewers, we conducted a survey-based reception study on a group of 52 Polish hearing speakers who watched a multilingual film with interlingual subtitles in two versions: one where subtitles were coloured, i.e. each language was marked with a different colour, and the other, control condition, where the subtitles were traditionally white. We measured participants’ immersive tendency, immersion, comprehension, and cognitive load. While colour coding did not have a significant impact on immersion, we found that individuals with a lower tendency for immersion reported higher immersion levels when watching coloured subtitles. Our results may contribute to the discussion how to render the multilingual nature of films in interlingual subtitling.

摘要

多语种电影并不总是能顺利跨越国界。翻译后，多语种可能会被中和并被淘汰。在字幕中，原稿中使用的多种语言通常不会在目标字幕中以任何方式标记。这导致中和和语言同质化，目标观众甚至可能没有意识到电影中使用了不同的语言。在这项研究中，我们测试了一种新的解决方案，旨在帮助在语言间字幕中保留电影的多语言性质：颜色编码策略。为了衡量颜色编码对观众的影响，我们对一组 52 名听力正常的波兰人进行了一项接受调查研究，他们观看了一部带有两种版本的多语种字幕的多语种电影：一种是彩色字幕，即每种语言都标有不同的颜色，另一个，控制条件，字幕传统上是白色的。我们测量了参与者的沉浸倾向、沉浸感、理解力和认知负荷。虽然颜色编码对沉浸感没有显着影响，但我们发现沉浸倾向较低的人在观看彩色字幕时报告的沉浸感水平较高。我们的研究结果可能有助于讨论如何在语际字幕中呈现电影的多语种性质。