Subtitling has a very different role in countries with millions of people speaking their language and in small countries like Slovenia. Considering the fact that dubbing costs ten times as much as subtitling, Slovenia...Subtitling has a very different role in countries with millions of people speaking their language and in small countries like Slovenia. Considering the fact that dubbing costs ten times as much as subtitling, Slovenia has traditionally turned to subtitling in order to present foreign TV and film production to the audiences. The development of subtitling after WWll can be divided into two periods： before and after 1990, for obvious reasons. During the first period that started in the 1950s, the stress was on quality all along, additionally spurned by the development of technology. TV Ljubljana with its group of pro fessional translators was the leading motor of progress in this field. The translators were all college-educated and willing to study new technologies that on the one hand made their work less time-consuming and on the other more prone to direct peer criticism. Computer technology, even though the beginnings now resemble the age of dinosaurs, made a big difference. The University of Ljubljana established a translation department that worked closely with the TV translation department, thus linking theory and practice in the best of possible ways. All the efforts were centred on quality. Democracy, however, gradually transferred the stress onto quantity. The newly-established commercial TV houses started lowering translation fees, encouraging competition not in quality but in lower prices. Globalization brought a few international subtitling firms on the Slovene market, causing a drastic drop in translation fees. The best translators /bund other job opportunities while subtitling done by non-expert translators and inexperienced students can most often be described as ＂anything goes＂. The trouble is that the number of subtitles that a TV viewer reads per year amounts to a book of approximately a thousand pages. That means that bad translations on TV screens influence the quality level of language among the users, especially among young viewers devoted to the consumption of fast food and fast culture. The increasingly popular permissive view of language use at our universities is causing a drop in language standards and norms. It is a vicious circle that will be difficult to break.展开更多
文摘Subtitling has a very different role in countries with millions of people speaking their language and in small countries like Slovenia. Considering the fact that dubbing costs ten times as much as subtitling, Slovenia has traditionally turned to subtitling in order to present foreign TV and film production to the audiences. The development of subtitling after WWll can be divided into two periods： before and after 1990, for obvious reasons. During the first period that started in the 1950s, the stress was on quality all along, additionally spurned by the development of technology. TV Ljubljana with its group of pro fessional translators was the leading motor of progress in this field. The translators were all college-educated and willing to study new technologies that on the one hand made their work less time-consuming and on the other more prone to direct peer criticism. Computer technology, even though the beginnings now resemble the age of dinosaurs, made a big difference. The University of Ljubljana established a translation department that worked closely with the TV translation department, thus linking theory and practice in the best of possible ways. All the efforts were centred on quality. Democracy, however, gradually transferred the stress onto quantity. The newly-established commercial TV houses started lowering translation fees, encouraging competition not in quality but in lower prices. Globalization brought a few international subtitling firms on the Slovene market, causing a drastic drop in translation fees. The best translators /bund other job opportunities while subtitling done by non-expert translators and inexperienced students can most often be described as ＂anything goes＂. The trouble is that the number of subtitles that a TV viewer reads per year amounts to a book of approximately a thousand pages. That means that bad translations on TV screens influence the quality level of language among the users, especially among young viewers devoted to the consumption of fast food and fast culture. The increasingly popular permissive view of language use at our universities is causing a drop in language standards and norms. It is a vicious circle that will be difficult to break.
