Same-language subtitling and literacy

I’ve come across this phenomenon before; I always become hypercreative around exam times. It’s as if my brain was desperate to think about anything BUT the courses I have exams in. The last few days I have had a slew of new ideas, checked out books from the library, emailed people. Some of those ideas involve research on the Chinese diaspora in Toronto, as well as looking at use of different languages in academic publishing and teaching in non-English countries.

I might write more about these topics later, as they start to pan out or not, for now I just wanted to mention a topic I came across last night - same-language subtitling (SLS) as a tool for literacy. It was first mentioned on the Google blog, that the Google foundation would be supporting an Indian NGO (Planet Read) that believed putting same-language subtitles on movies and TV-shows in India would help increase the functional literacy of a people that has an abysmal literacy rate.

I did a Google Scholar search for these topics, and came up with a number of articles written by the same people that work for PlanetRead, including one study where they had done a controlled experiment with school-children watching music videos with subtitles or without over a three month period. Apparently just from that, the results were tangible. This certainly jibes with my experience as a foreign language learner; I’ve found that watching for example Spanish movies with Spanish subtitles vastly improves my understanding, and I assume also my listening skills.

Almost all TV programmes in China are subtitles in Chinese. I always assumed that this was to increase access for people who did not understand Mandarin (of course, the characters are the same, even if the dialect changes; a peculiar Chinese feature), but this made me wonder whether there was some kind of underlying literacy agenda (certainly applaudable if there was one). I’ve always thought that the reason Mainland Chinese can read traditional characters as well as they do, is because of Taiwanese karaoke CDs.

I also came across an article about dubbing in Spain. I’ve always known that big countries in Europe dub their movies (have actors read another language on top of the original - mostly very professionally done), but that smaller countries like Norway, the Netherlands and Slovenia subtitle, and thought it mainly a question of market size (dubbing is expensive!). Yet, the author of this paper posits that Fascism had a large influence; during Franco movies were forbidden to speak any languages but Spanish. However lately there is a movement towards more subtitling, and the author believes that email and text messages has made people more used to reading short stubs of text, similar to the subtitles on the screen.

Stian
PS: And if you wonder how I managed to “come across” these things, while supposedly studying like crazy for soil science and associated joys, don’t even go there…

Others:
Subtitling and machinima, mentioning downloadable separate subtitle files, which are a topic in themselves - finally subtitling is for the masses! And DIY machinima and fansubs etc are a really cool example of the democratizing effects of subtitling in sharing movies internationally.
Apparently the Greek open university is using subtitling to teach Spanish (here is the university site).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 13th, 2005 at 10:00 and is filed under education/academia, tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.