This week
- Bench
- 21 April 2027 Annotate, then remove annotating, then stripping
- Slides
- Open the deck
A commercial subtitle removes the seam. It is paid to. The viewer is not supposed to notice that a decision was made, and the highest praise for the work is that nobody thought about it.
Volunteer subtitling communities frequently do the opposite. A bracketed note in the middle of a line, a term left untranslated because the substitute would lie, a paragraph at the top of the frame explaining a joke that cannot survive the crossing: these are not failures of craft. They are an audience that has asked to see the working.
Outline#
- the fansub as an annotated edition rather than a rough one
- what a translator’s note does to the viewer’s relationship with the text
- reconstructing a community’s values from what it refuses to smooth
- the hardest reconstruction in the course: a mechanism made of people
Teaching team
- Aurel Marchetti — tutor