Evolución de la subtitulación para sordos en España y su normativa: estudio de cuatro películas

Abstract

Subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing (SDH) is a well-known method of audiovisual translation that constitute a big step to reach the equality to access to audiovisual contents to all kind of publics. In Spain, there has been official standards of SDH since 2012. Nevertheless, there are not comparative studies that reflect the appliance of these standards to the current SDH procedure and without these studies is difficult to appreciate its evolution to find the strength points and the weaknesses. This paper offers two comparative analyses of the selected pieces of four Spanish films to find the regularities between the official Spanish standards of SDH and the postnormative SDH method, and the evolution between prenormative subtitles and those elaborated after the publication of the current standards. The methodology used to develop these analyses was the comparison of the aspects mentioned in the current official Spanish standards of SDH with different pieces of subtitles of four Spanish films chosen by their contents and the appliance they could have to the study. The results, commentated in each analysis, show that despite of the fact that the descriptive standards were conceived to unify and homogenize the SDH procedure, there are some aspects which tend to differ from the norm like the position of the subtitle or the tags used to represent contextual information. However, the results also indicate that there has been an evolution of SDH towards the compliance of the necessities related to deaf users. Yet, it is worth observing that there is a long way to walk to reach equality of accessibility because the heterogeneity of the appliance of this subtitling method remain in most contents.