This week
- Lecture
- 19 April 2027 The volunteer, and the seam left in
- Slides
- Open the deck
Bench
- Material
- forty seconds of video
- Operation
- annotating, then stripping
- Leaves
- two subtitle tracks and an account of what the clean one lost
Forty seconds of video, two subtitle tracks, and an argument about which one is more honest.
The exercise
Take a clip in a language you read. Subtitle it twice.
The first version keeps the seam: a bracketed note where a word does not carry over, the original term left in when the substitute would lie, a line at the top of the frame explaining a joke that cannot survive.
The second version is what a distributor would ship. No notes. No top-of-frame text. Nothing that admits a translator was in the room.
The argument
The second version reads better and is easier to watch, and everyone in the room will prefer it. Then say what it can no longer tell you, and who decided that on the viewer’s behalf.
Afterwards
A fansub is the only artefact in this course whose errors are deliberate. That makes it the hardest thing to reconstruct backwards, because for once the mechanism is a group of people with values rather than a table.
The spec
What you bring to the session. Written so a reader can tell whether it has been met without asking you.
- you have two versions of the same forty seconds, annotated and clean
- you can name one thing the clean version cannot recover
- you have said who each version is for
Teaching team
- Aurel Marchetti — tutor