The Implicitness in Dubbing versus Subtitling

Abstract

The purpose of the Present study was to determine the difference between translations of English feature films and their Persian dubbed and subtitled versions in terms of implicitness. To this aim, i.e., to find the degree of implicitness the researcher conducted the research in the light of Larson's (1984) concept of implicit information/meaning. The material gathered for this purpose consisted of five movies in two versions, one dubbed and the other subtitled version. The research investigated hundred minutes of the movies (twenty minutes from each movie) containing a total of 1600 frames of which 163 frames contained implicit meaning/information in either of the two versions. In order to have a contrastive analysis of the two versions, the two translations were listed in tables to be compared and contrasted so as to track down instances of implicit meaning. Afterwards, the researcher got a percentage at the frequency of referential, situational and organizational implicit meanings in the two versions. According to the statistical analysis 80.37 percent of the implicit meanings in the five films belonged to the subtitled versions and 19.63 percent of the implicit meanings belonged to the dubbed versions. Thus, the findings testified that subtitled versions are more implicit than their corresponding dubbed versions. Meanwhile, implicit situational meaning had the highest frequency and implicit organizational meaning the least.

Keywords: Audiovisual Translation, Dubbing, Implicitness, Implicit Organizational Meaning, Implicit Referential Meaning, Implicit Situational Meaning, Subtitling