The use of subtitling in general translation courses: an empirical study of the effects of subtitling activities on the development of students’ translation competence

Abstract

Several academics have focused their research on analyzing the educational benefits of including specific subtitling modules within translator training aiming at training professional subtitlers (Blane, 1996; Klerkx, 1998; Williams & Thorne, 2000; Díaz-Cintas, 2001; Neves, 2004; Bartoll & Orero, 2008; Díaz-Cintas, 2008; Kruger, 2008; Bartrina, 2009). Although some of these authors (Klerkx, 1998; Neves, 2004; Kruger, 2008) pointed out the impact that subtitling has on the acquisition and development of general translation skills and argued in favor of its inclusion in general translation courses, there are still few studies dedicated to analyzing the use of active subtitling in non-audiovisual translation courses. Only three relevant qualitative studies (Kiraly, 2005; Incalcaterra 2009, 2010; Beseghi, 2018), a quasi-experimental study (Talaván & Ávila-Cabrera, 2015) and a didactic proposal (Orozco, 2009) that address the use of active interlinguistic subtitling in the field of translator training are registered. Along this line of research, this article presents an empirical experimental study based on the application of subtitling skills in general translation courses which is carried out in the context of translator training at BA level.