Focusing on Audiovisual Translation Research E-Book

AAVV

• Herausgeber: Publicacions de la Universitat de València
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: English In The World Series
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 327

Beschreibung

The aim of this volume is to make a statement on the importance of research on Audiovisual Translation, both in its different varieties of production (dubbing, subtitling, surtitling, voice-over and e-learning) and in its relationship with language acquisition. On the whole, it is a merging of applied theory and practice, with a willingness to encourage a dialogue between scholars specialized in this field that may expand to other fields.

Leseprobe

Focusing on Audiovisual Translation Research

ENGLISH IN THE WORLD SERIES

GENERAL EDITOR

Antonia Sánchez MacarroUniversitat de València, Spain

ADVISORY EDITORIAL BOARD

Professor Enrique BernárdezUniversidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain

Professor Anne BurnsMacquarie University, Sydney, Australia

Professor Angela DowningUniversidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain

Dr Martin HewingsUniversity of Birmingham, Great Britain

Professor Ken HylandUniversity of East Anglia, Norwich, Great Britain

Professor James LantolfPenn State University, Pennsylvania, USA

Professor Michael McCarthyUniversity of Nottingham, Great Britain

Professor Eija VentolaUniversity of Helsinki, Findland

© The authors © 2018 by the Universitat de València

Design and typeset: Celso Hdez. de la Figuera Cover design by Pere Fuster (Borràs i Talens Assessors SL)

I S B N : 9 7 8 - 8 4 - 9 1 3 4 - 4 0 2 - 5

CONTENTS

Notes on Contributors

Introduction, John D. Sanderson & Carla Botella-Tejera

1 TeenTitles. Implementation of a methodology based on Teenage subTitles to improve written skillsJosé Javier Ávila-Cabrera

2 The adaptation for audio-visual translation and the language service providers: a lost battle. The multimedia producer’s perspectiveJosé María Bazán Domenech

3 The pedagogical potential of cloud-based platforms: a study on the didactics of subtitling in online translator training environmentsAlejandro Bolaños García-Escribano

4 The realities of surtitling for the theatre in the digital ageMichèle Laliberté

5 Humorous elements and signifying codes. Points of convergence in audiovisual productsJuan José Martínez Sierra

6 The process of dubbing and its synchrony in video gamesLaura Mejías Climent

7 A bibliometric analysis of doctoral dissertations in the subdiscipline of audiovisual translationFrancisco Pérez Escudero

8 Mapping L3 in audiovisual productionsLaura Santamaria Guinot & Miquel Pujol Tubau

9 Voice-over to improve oral production skills: the VICTOR projectNoa Talaván & Pilar Rodríguez-Arancón

Notes on Contributors

JOSÉ JAVIER ÁVILA-CABRERA, PhD, works as a lecturer at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain), in the English Studies Department. He holds a PhD in English Studies by the UNED, specialising in the field of the treatment of offensive and taboo terms in subtitling. Amongst his academic interests are audiovisual translation (AVT), AVT as an L2 learning tool, and the use of technology in foreign language education (CALL and MALL).

JOSÉ MARÍA BAZÁN DOMENECH holds a degree in Translation and Interpreting and is currently working on his PhD in Audiovisual translation. He is a full-time audiovisual producer with over 25 years of experience in multimedia productions and an accomplished voiceover talent with over 30 years in the media. He owns Lucentum Digital Productions, a multimedia workhouse in Alicante, Spain, and Literaudio, an audiobook publishing company. He is also a voice coach and teacher at the Alicante Dubbing School and the University of Alicante.

ALEJANDRO BOLAÑOS GARCÍA-ESCRIBANO is a PhD candidate, postgraduate teaching assistant and teaching fellow at University College London, where he teaches translation at both the Centre for Translation Studies and the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies. He holds a joint degree on Translation and Humanities Studies from Pablo de Olavide University, and a master’s degree on Translation Studies from the University of Malaga, as well as a master of science on Audiovisual Translation from University College London’s Centre for Translation Studies. He is currently researching the pedagogical potential of subtitling and cloud-based systems in collaboration with subtitling software developers. He also works as a freelance translator and foreign language teacher in London.

MICHÈLE LALIBERTÉ master’s thesis examines the use of Québécois and joual in theatre translation in Quebec, and shows the need to integrate play translations into the social context of the target audience. Her doctoral research in Translation Studies is a formal, stylistic and socio-cultural analysis of popular songs in translation. She joined the Department of Études langagières of the Université du Québec en Outaouais in 2011, where she is now Professor in transla tion. Her main research expertise lies in audiovisual translation, particularly surtitling for the theatre.

JUAN JOSÉ MARTÍNEZ SIERRA, PhD, works as a senior lecturer in the Department of English and German Studies at the Universitat de València. He is specialized in Audiovisual Translation. To date, his research activity has been generously fruitful in the form of lectures, seminars, invited talks and papers at conferences. Besides, he has published numerous works, including five books, several book chapters, reviews, and many other pieces of research in the form of articles in prestigious scientific journals. He coordinates CiTrans, and also collaborates with the research groups TRAMA (Universitat Jaume I) and SILVA (Universitat de València).

LAURA MEJÍAS CLIMENT, with a Bachelor’s degree in Translation and Interpreting, is currently studying a PhD in AVT at the Universitat Jaume I, where she is now a researcher in training thanks to a FPI scholarship. Her lines of research focus on Descriptive Translation Studies, specifically, on translation for dubbing and video game localization. She holds a Master’s Degree in AVT, a Master’s Degree in Translation and New Technologies and a Master’s Degree in Secondary Education and Languages.

FRANCISCO PÉREZ ESCUDERO is an assistant professor of English language and translation at the Universidad de Alicante, Spain. He also works part-time as a freelance translator in the fields of audiovisual translation, law and finance and technical texts, and he is an expert in computer-assisted tools for translation and localisation. With a BA in translation and interpreting and an MA in Asia-Pacific studies, Francisco is currently preparing a PhD thesis on bibliometrics, webometrics and audiovisual translation.

MIQUEL PUJOL TUBAU is currently a lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Vic - Central University of Catalonia, where he teaches translation theory and audiovisual translation both at undergraduate and postgraduate level. In 2015, he completed his PhD thesis, which deals with the use of dubbing in the representation of characters in films and videogames in transmedia storytelling projects. His research interests include audiovisual translation, multilingualism, intertextuality, localisation and media studies.

NOA TALAVÁN, PhD, holds a senior lecturer position in the Foreign Languages Department of the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), Spain, specialising in the areas of Translation, English for Specific Purposes and CALL (Computer-Assisted Language Learning). She is a member of the ATLAS research group and her main field of research is audiovisual translation and foreign language education.

PILAR RODRÍGUEZ ARANCÓN, PhD, is a lecturer at UNED, where she specialises in the areas of Translation, CALL and CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning). She is a member of the ATLAS research group and her main field of research is the influence of culture in the areas of audiovisual translation and foreign language teaching.

LAURA SANTAMARIA GUINOT has taught translation since 1985 at the Faculty of Translation and Interpreting in the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, where she has held various management positions and where she has been the Dean of Faculty since 2011. Her research is based on issues related to the mass media, intertextuality and cultural studies. She has taught specialised translation, specifically subjects on screen and multimedia translation and legal translation. She has also served as a teacher of translation and developer of materials for on-line master’s degree courses at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and New York University. She has worked as a professional translator for various Catalan publishing houses and for Televisió de Catalunya as a screen translator.

Introduction

There has been a huge increase in publications devoted to Audio-visual Translation, and doctoral dissertations in seven years of this decade have already doubled those presented on this field in the previous decade worldwide (see chapter 7 in this volume). And even other disciplines not directly connected to Translation include references to language transfer in the audiovisual sphere due to the unavoidable support of this mode of representation in contemporary academicism. The relevance of this field of research is here to stay.

The aim of this volume is to make a statement on the importance of research categorized under the heading of its title, both in its different varieties of production (dubbing, subtitling, surtitling, voice-over and e-learning) and in its relationship with language acquisition. Its impact is consequently felt in the professional world, where results of nationally and internationally funded projects are pouring in together with a technological advancement which is making firms connected to the audiovisual world speedily redesign their production and marketing strategies (see chapter 2). On the whole, a merging of applied theory and practice is required, and our willingness with this volume is to encourage a dialogue between scholars specialized in Audiovisual Translation that may expand to other fields. We can already find here the effect it is having in EFL teaching as well, but the generalized interdisciplinary approach can also give way to other options such as creative design, script-writing or performing arts.

Being published in Spain, this volume would expectedly focus its attention on the research on the favored mode of audiovisual language transfer: dubbing. For instance, Santamaria and Pujol’s chapter, “Mapping L3 in audiovisual productions”, analyzes how translators deal with the overlapping of different languages in the source text, and how it influences the final understanding in the target text. L3 (current terminology which describes the presence of a language different from L1 in the source text) may coincide with L2, or might consist of a sociolect invented for a fictional community in a specific production which has an underlying link with L1; this will require a necessary degree of manipulation in its transfer to the target text. Dubbing has the theoretical advantage for translators that the soundtrack with the original dialogues is erased, which seems to encourage a wider range of textual manipulation. The results of this research make up for a useful list of translation strategies that, in quite a few cases, reveal remarkable diversions from the source text.

Mejías’ “The process of dubbing and its synchrony in video games” brings to the fore a widely used term in this area of translation for computerized entertainment, “localization”, which refers to the process of adaptation of the source text to a specific target cultural context. Her instance on dubbing synchrony, here referred to as “full localization”, promotes a professional step forward in a currently booming market that could afford the cost involved in an improved synchronizing precision. With the support of an epistemological basis supplied by Chaume’s canonical research on translation for dubbing, Mejías performs a case study whose statistical results prove that the not so precise synchrony is still accepted, but that a requirement for a further adjustment, based on traditional dubbing, is looming above the horizon of certain national markets.

Concerning subtitling, Bolaños’ chapter on “The pedagogical potential of cloud-based platforms” focuses on how these relatively new devices could have a remarkably positive effect on translator training. The wider access to these tools, a result of the advancement of translation technology, would facilitate the work for professionals who do not have a permanent working space, and also enable students to perform subtitling tasks from home, since they might not have had so far an easy access to the software available in private firms or academic institutions. A thorough survey performed in this research project does supply some interesting conclusions, mainly that translation trainers, who, to a certain degree, are also working as professional translators for subtitling, are willing to extend the use of these platforms among their students due to their effectiveness for their training.

Ávila’s chapter, headed by the ad-hoc coined term TeenTitles, is more specifically devoted to the use of subtitling for EFL teaching. Its starting point is thought-provoking, since it deals with how EFL students can improve their written skills by translating for subtitling. Even though the pre-assigned tasks got fewer responses than expected, the high percentage of perceived improvement in written skills among EFL students, and the inclusion of a good practice guide highlighting elements that should be taken into account in other similar case studies, make its reading worthy of consideration for upcoming research.

Voice-over is yet another typology of audiovisual language transfer present in this volume. Talaván and Rodríguez’s chapter, “Voice over to improve oral production skills: the VICTOR project”, is also linked to EFL teaching, as it specifically focuses on the improvement of pronunciation in English without dealing with the actual language transfer. Interestingly, the task performed for their research project, the composition of a new dialogue in L1 for the revoicing of the American advertisements compiled by the authors, also involves listening and writing skills, but the main challenge was the improvement of the oral production of their students. An enlightening visual compilation of results from different angles in various tables and figures verifies the usefulness of this approach.

Another relevant mode of representation in our field is surtitling, still contested in some academic circles as not specifically audiovisual. Laliberté’s article, “The realities of surtitling for the theatre in a digital age”, makes a clear point in its favor by means of the account of her personal experience with current stage designing, which foregrounds technology to an extent that necessarily involves linguistic transfer. Surprisingly, as her research proves, it is professional translators who are way behind the current technological advancement, at least in Canada, location of her case study, since they are still using almost unanimously PowerPoint software to submit their work, for reasons that range from economy to easy access, even though it has blatant limitations for this purpose. Linguistic issues are presented in a more positive light, including rhythm and musicality as well as the customary semantic accuracy.

Technical production (whether it is dubbing, subtitling, voice-over or surtitling) is, therefore, an overwhelming issue of the translation process, and that is why the presentation of Bazán’s own professional experience in his chapter on “The adaptation for audio-visual translation and the language service providers” will be extremely helpful for the rest of the members of the semiotic chain of production of the language transfer process. He writes about knowhow technical strategies to apply when the target texts submitted do not fit into the timing constraints, almost a pledge for translators to take some extra revision time before submitting their texts. In some extreme cases, his production team on occasions has even had to slightly slow down the video for voice-over presentations or speed up the recorded voice, everything in order to synchronize sound and image. He rounds off his text, which makes for thrilling reading, with a useful list of recommendations linked to the professional relationship with Language Service Providers, sprinkled with a much appreciated humor.

Humor is the topic of the only chapter in this volume which does not deal with a specific mode of screen translation, since the aim of Martínez Sierra’s contribution, “Humorous elements and signifying codes. Points of convergence in audiovisual products”, is to broadly systematize how it functions in audiovisual productions, and therefore provide many tips concerning how its perlocutionary effect can be transferred to target texts. The author brings his research together with that of the above mentioned Chaume in order to generate a convergence which derives into a study of signifying codes that contributes to the understanding of how audiovisual humor works and, consequently, how it can be translated.

Last, but not least, we must foreground Pérez Escudero’s metaresearching contribution, “A bibliometric analysis of doctoral dissertations in the subdiscipline of audiovisual translation”, which shares the general spirit of this volume. The expanding interest on this academic field is confirmed by the geometrical increase in the number of dissertations presented worldwide. In accordance with the nationality of most contributors to this volume, Spanish is the second most used language in dissertations concerning the field (23,33% of the total), obviously after English, and very far ahead of the third (Portuguese, with 10,61%). However, more surprising is the fact that Spain, and also France, already have more dissertations focused on subtitling than on dubbing in spite of the fact that their traditional mode of screen translation is the latter. A new trend could be anticipated in academic circles, with its consequences coming soon to screens near you.

On the whole, our aim is that this compilation of contributions in which audiovisual translation is its main thread, but is also connected with other linguistic fields, will answer a lot of questions and also encourage further empirical research on this area of studies. It makes up a general vision of different approaches, mainly pedagogical, hoping that the current dynamics experienced on this field of research can expand even further, and that new debates will hopefully be opened in the near future.

JOHN D. SANDERSONCARLA BOTELLA-TEJERA

1

TeenTitles. Implementation of a methodology based on Teenage subTitles to improve written skills

JOSÉ JAVIER ÁVILA-CABRERAUniversidad Complutense de Madrid

AbstractAudiovisual translation in the foreign languages (L2) classroom is gaining ground both among scholars and language teachers. Owing to the low level of foreign language ability shown by a considerable number of students in Spain, new methodologies need to be implemented to teach English in secondary schools. The present chapter focuses on interlingual subtitling as an active task to improve students’ written English skills. This quasi-experiment was carried out in a secondary school in the north of Madrid and concerned students in the third grade (i.e. the 14-15 year age group). A control and an experimental group were evaluated on the basis of a composition written in English and submitted at the end of term using written assessment criteria. The experimental group had a number of interlingual subtitling classes and used the open access website Amara, which enables users to subtitle videos in L2. The participants also filled in a preand post-study questionnaire so that the researcher could obtain some qualitative data. This study was carried out to provide teachers and researchers with a number of recommendations and a good practice guide to enable teenage students to improve their L2 written skills using active subtitling as a teaching method. Keywords: Interlingual subtitling; written skills; secondary students; quasi-experimental design.

1Introduction

Teachers of English as a foreign language (L2) are very much in need of new methodologies in the classroom. Gaining the attention of their students and making learning an enjoyable and interesting process is not an easy task, particularly where teenagers are concerned. In Spain, for example, a considerable number of teenagers find it difficult to express themselves in written English. The use of audiovisual translation (AVT) is therefore proving a feasible tool for youngsters (including millennials and digital natives), as they are very much used to dealing with digital material. Thus, the use of audiovisual content in the classroom can at least make children pay more attention, as well as making the learning process an entertaining and enjoyable activity. Subtitling as an active task was considered as a potential solution to improving Spanish secondary students’ written skills, since the activities related to it can be entertaining, dynamic and stimulating and are, therefore, capable of breaking the routine monotony of the classroom.

This study focuses mainly on interlingual subtitling (the transfer of an audiovisual text from a source language into a target language considering the cultures involved) as a tool that can help students to produce better texts in English and improve their written skills. To do this, the researcher followed a series of steps, some of which should have been carried out by the students more thoroughly so that the subtitling activities could have resulted in improved L2 written language production.

The present paper is arranged in the following manner so that it: (1) explains the steps followed in the experiment; (2) observes and discusses the results brought to light by this method, which can vary according to the participants involved; and (3) provides foreign language practitioners and scholars with sound practice guidelines for similar projects including teenagers learning an L2.

2Subtitling as a tool in the foreign language classroom

Given the variety of AVT, and depending on the skills that need to be improved in the L2 classroom, teachers and scholars are able to make use of a whole array of activities aimed to improve different skills with the support of ICT tools. Different approaches have been taken over the years with regard to dealing with subtitling as a tool in foreign language education. An increasing number of studies on the use of subtitles in the classroom have been conducted during the last decades (Borrás and Lafayette 1994; Danan 1992, 2004, 2015; Díaz Cintas 1995, 2012; Gambier 2015; Incalcaterra and Lertola 2011, 2014; Neves 2004; Talaván 2006, 2011, 2013; Vander-plank 1998, 2015, among others).

Díaz Cintas (2001) divides the different types of subtitles into intralingual (both the audio and the subtitles are in the same language, from L2 to L2), interlingual (the audio is in one language and the subtitles in another, from L2 to L1) and bilingual (the audio is in one language and the subtitles in the same language along with a second, from L1 to L1 and L2). As far as subtitles with a didactic purpose are concerned, Talaván (2013) establishes a taxonomy as follows: bimodal subtitles (audio in L2 and subtitles in L2, intralingual); traditional or standard subtitles (audio in L2 and subtitles in L1, interlingual); and reverse subtitles (audio in L1 and subtitles in L2, interlingual). The term used for the purposes of this experiment is interlingual subtitles. From a didactic point of view, some authors support the idea that “through subtitling, be it reverse or direct/traditional, learners perform a task within a complete didactic context involving images, sounds, translation and the use of ICTs” (Talaván and Rodríguez-Arancón 2014: 86). This provides teachers with numerous ways in which to exploit active subtitling in the L2 class, combining “verbal and non-verbal sounds, graphemes and other visual semiotic signs” (Zabalbeascoa 2008: 34) as elements that conform to the audiovisual text.

In the case of Spain, for example, Talaván (2006, 2010, 2011) has conducted pioneering and extensive research in the field of active subtitles in the L2 classroom. She analyses the potential of subtitles as a support for enhancing language skills, and subtitling as an active task for students to improve their written skills in an L2, distinguishing between merely viewing subtitles (a passive activity) and allowing students to participate in the subtitling process as a concrete activity (active subtitling). Talaván (2012, 2013) justifies the use of subtitles in the L2 class in theory and practice by making use of mixed methods to validate the potential of active subtitling for the improvement of linguistic skills. Talaván and Rodríguez-Arancón (2014) examine the benefits of written and translation skills by using reverse subtitling within a collaborative online setting. Using AVT as an innovative method of teaching, Talaván and Ávila-Cabrera (2015) assess the combination of dubbing and subtitling activities within a quasi-experimental setting. This research aims to improve translation, written and oral production skills through the dubbing and reverse subtitling of videos.

LeVIS (http://levis.cti.gr/index.php?lang=en), Learning via Subtitling, is a pioneering project in which the creation of materials for the L2 class along with video subtitling activities via the LvS software created exclusively for the project were the main goals (Sokoli, Zabalbeascoa and Fountana 2011). This multicultural project involved six European countries (Hungary, Romania, UK, Portugal, Greece and Spain), most of the participants being from a university background. Among the most important findings, the researchers pinpoint the manner in which the participants benefitted from the different activities created for the project independently of their linguistic level, language, etc. A second major project involving the creation of AVT activities is ClipFlair (Baños and Sokoli 2015; Sokoli 2006, 2015). This platform (http://clipflair.net/) allows users to interact with videos to which voice and text can be added, that is, they deal with diverse AVT modes such as dubbing, voiceover, direct and reverse subtitling and the like. Users can benefit from diverse platform tools (activity, video and image gallery and studio), different languages and topics for captioning and re-voicing both for the classroom and online learning.

Learning vocabulary is another area that has been researched using AVT activities in the classroom. Talaván (2007) analyses ways of learning vocabulary through the subtitling of authentic videos. A publication worth mentioning in this area is Lertola’s (2012), which she devotes to incidental vocabulary acquisition via subtitling activities for students of Italian as an L2. Sanderson (2015) and Marzà and Torralba (2015) examine language learning on the basis of subtitled cartoons. Whereas the former analyses the way foreign idioms can be taught, the latter approach their study to incidental learning in Spain, which is a dubbing stronghold. In addition, since language teaching directly concerns culture, there are also studies worth mentioning on improving cultural awareness and intercultural content (Boreghetti 2011; Borghetti and Lertola 2014) through the use of subtitling.

Some of the most current AVT modes that concern accessibility can also be applied to the teaching of foreign languages. Talaván and Ávila-Cabrera (2016) conducted a project at the Spanish National Open University (UNED), in which 128 videos were subtitled collaboratively from English into Spanish using Amara (http://www.amara.org/es/) and making them accessible to a wider audience by finally uploading them to YouTube. The aforementioned authors (2017) have continued to research this field, which has begun to be referred to as social subtitling (non-professional subtitling with the aim of making audiovisual materials accessible to a wider audience), and also within the UNED, university students subtitled videos interlingually (six from English to Spanish and 10 from Spanish to English) on university-related contents and commissioned by CanalUNED (https://canal.uned.es/), the UNED audiovisual repository. Diverse subtitling software programmes were offered to participants for the purposes of the project, once again including Amara. Both projects therefore demonstrate how social subtitling can benefit students in terms of linguistic improvement as well as gaining insights into translation strategies and the conventions of this AVT mode.

3The experiment

A multi-strategy design (Robson and McCartan 2016) has been chosen for the present study from among the various methods available in the field of L2 teaching. The reason for this is that the researcher has made use of both qualitative data in the form of a pre- and post-study questionnaire and quantitative data by means of written English assessments. The research was designed around the following research questions, which were addressed by analysing the collected data:

• Is active subtitling a useful tool for teenage students’ written English (as an L2)?

• Are subtitling tasks entertaining and useful for the purposes of L2 learning in the case of teenagers?

This research is quasi-experimental inasmuch as the allocation of the population was not random. Both the experimental and control groups provided quantitative data through the assessment of their English compositions and, in the case of the former, pre and post-study questionnaires were filled out in order to include more data on their level of proficiency in English, familiarity with ICT tools, etc. Data triangulation was then used to obtain more reliable results (Denzin 1988) in terms of the aforementioned data sources. Regarding the treatment of these data, the sequential explanatory design (Creswell 2003) was used to examine the quantitative data. The qualitative data were then scrutinised with the aim of validating or refuting the findings previously obtained.

The project took place during the 2015-2016 academic course in a private centre supported by public funds named Colegio de Jesús, based in the north of Madrid. This school uses a bilingual project called Programa Beda (www.ecmadrid.org/programas/programabeda) which is intended for religious schools in Madrid. Their main goals include fostering students’ English skills by implementing activities as well as promoting communication in English, offering students the opportunity of taking the Cambridge English language assessments, providing the students with English native speakers as language assistants in infant, primary and secondary classes and offering them the opportunity of participating in English summer camps and staying in British schools during the summer holidays, among other things.

The author of this paper was the only researcher to conduct this study. The chosen course was the third course in secondary school and, considering that text-books are usually changed every four years in Madrid, it must be said that these students had just received a new international English course book for that school year. This was Succeed in English (2013), published by Oxford University Press, level B2, in accordance with the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFRL). Both the students’ book and workbook aim to improve grammar, vocabulary, reading and listening skills and writing, as well as everyday listening and speaking, familiarity with culture and Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) and literature. It also includes a wide choice of audiovisual materials (video and audio) in the digital book that teachers can use in class. This meant that the level of the book was higher than the students’ competences in the different skills, so the use of an innovative tool for the improvement of written work in English (one of the skills with which a considerable number of students have problems) could prove a useful resource. Given that one of the main goals of this project was to evaluate the potential of subtitling as an active task, two groups were chosen and defined. There was a control group made up of 21 students and an experimental group of 31 students. The latter had a number of active subtitling (Talaván 2012) sessions as their innovative task.

In addition, both groups followed the contents included in the course syllabus, and every term they submitted an English composition to be assessed according to the rubric shown below.

TABLE 1Writing production assessment rubric

Grammar: the student is able to produce grammatically correct structures.Vocabulary: there is a variety of different vocabulary used throughout the composition.Syntax: word order is followed based on English and idiomatic structures.Cohesion: the student is able to present connected ideas, developing and supporting arguments.

The purpose of including the assessment criteria was an attempt to assess the compositions in more precise and accurate terms. All the students had to write an assessed composition in English (some 70-80 words) every term on the following topics:

• 1st term: What type of clothes do you like wearing? Write a description of the clothes you wear during the week, at weekends and on special occasions.

• 2nd term: Write an informal e-mail inviting your friends to your house for your birthday party. Tell them that they can bring some friends over and that there’s no need to bring any food or drinks.

• 3rd term: Today, more and more people are used to being connected to their smartphones at all times. Can youngsters and adults become addicted to them? Support your argument either in favour or against this statement.

The activities involved in the experiment were organised over the three terms and took place in a secondary school in Madrid. These can be seen in table 2.

TABLE 2Tasks and subtitling sessions

Time line

Tasks

Subtitling sessions

1st term (September-November 2015)

1st composition

• 16 October 2015 subtitling conventions

• 23 October 2015 pre-study questionnaire

• 5 November 2015 Amara (tutorials)

• 27 November 2015 Amara (tutorials)

2nd term (December-March 2015-2016)

2nd composition

• 4 December 2015 subtitling practice

• 15 January 2016 subtitling practice

• 5 February 2016 subtitling practice

• 11 March 2016 subtitling practice

3rd term (April-June 2016)

3rd composition

• 8 April 2016 subtitling practice

• 5 May 2016 subtitling practice

• 20 May 2016 subtitling practice

• 11 March 2016 subtitling practice / post-study questionnaire

As shown in table 2, during the first term, the first classes were used to provide the students with some general insights into subtitling conventions (Talaván, Ávila-Cabrera and Costal 2016), although no professional subtitles were expected of them. Although the students were told that a number of active subtitling activities were going to take place in order to improve their level of written English, no comprehensive instructions were given on the linguistic direction used to subtitle the videos or topics, which they could choose themselves by using Amara. It is worth noting here that, in order to improve the students’ written English skills, the audio should be in Spanish and the subtitles in English, although, in fact, their oral skills would also benefit from subtitling English to Spanish. All the students were organised in groups of two or three and instructed to subtitle at least one video by the end of the course. Some tutorials were also given on the use of Amara to familiarise the students with the platform. After all these preliminary steps, the subtitling sessions took place. Both the control and experimental groups had three hours of English per week, but in the case of the latter, an hour dedicated to tutorials was used so that there was no interference with regard to the number of regular tuition hours in English for both groups.

Regarding qualitative data, the students filled in a pre-study questionnaire1 containing general questions using Google forms. At the end of the project, a post-study questionnaire2 was also given to the students containing a number of questions on the project in order to assess learning outcomes, difficulties encountered and the like.

Amara was chosen as the subtitling platform because it is a user-friendly tool as well as to make the students aware of the ways in which social subtitling (Talaván and Ávila-Cabrera 2016, 2017) can benefit a myriad of users independently of their language proficiency. All the tools described above were used to implement this project.

4Data analysis and discussion

As this study follows a multi-strategy design (Robson and McCartan 2016), the triangulation of data is relevant so that quantitative data can be examined and then compared with qualitative data either to corroborate or refute the findings obtained, addressing the research questions outlined at the beginning of the paper scientifically:

• Is active subtitling a useful tool for teenage students’ written English (as an L2)?

• Are subtitling tasks entertaining and useful for the purposes of L2 learning in the case of teenagers?

Both these questions are answered once all the results have been obtained in the following sections where information on the questionnaires and the assessments written in English are analysed and discussed.

4.1. PRE-STUDY QUESTIONNAIRE

As far as the population is concerned, it was not chosen at random, so we are dealing with a quasi-experimental study, in which the control group was composed of 21 students and the experimental group had 31 out of which 27 students filled in the pre-study questionnaire, indicating that they had signed up for the project. They were mostly aged between 13 and 16; all students were Spanish (96.3%) with the exception of one student from the Dominican Republic (3.7%), and 48.1% were male and 51.9% female. As regards official English certificates, 88% had no level of certification in the English language at all.

In terms of their English oral and written skills, the students seemed to think they were mostly intermediate and upper-intermediate (57.7%) as they indicated in the pre-study questionnaire. However, this did not seem to correspond with the results obtained by most of them after they had taken some course tests. When they were asked about their written English skills, most students (66.6%) also indicated that they were intermediate and upper-intermediate. These data might also indicate that they did not actually have a thorough knowledge of the linguistic competences required at each level of the CEFRL.

They seemed to be very familiar with audiovisual materials as, indeed, the survey would indicate: 92.6% said that they relied on the support of audiovisual materials – in class (26.9%). Among these materials some corresponded to films (26.9%), TV series (11.5%), DVDs from course books (57.7%) and others (3.8%). Two questions dealt with subtitling and, in the case of intralingual subtitles (both audio and subtitles in English), 25.9% said they had never used them, 40.7% hardly ever, 14.8% sometimes and, finally, 18.5% said that they had used them often and always. Interlingual subtitles (audio in English and subtitles in Spanish) were more familiar to them, with only 37% admitting that they had never used them, 33.4% hardly ever, 14.8% sometimes, and 14.8% often and always. We can therefore infer that intralingual subtitles were more familiar to them with about 33.3% using them as against interlingual subtitles where the figure was 29.6%. This seemed to be a more common result among advanced learners, and did not seem to apply to some students whose marks and abilities in English language were poor. Concerning the various AVT modes available, while 37% said that they preferred audiovisual programmes dubbed into Spanish, 40.7% opted for subtitled programmes in their native tongue, 18.5% preferred subtitles in the original language and only 1% preferred programmes in the original version without subtitles.

The questions concerning their expectations from the project were important in order to analyse their views and opinions after the project. The majority of students – 77.8% – expected their written English to have improved, 29.6% their oral skills, 33.3% their reading comprehension skills and 59.3% their listening comprehension, while 59.3% expected to have expanded their vocabulary and 7.4% to have improved their computer skills. Considering that one of the main goals was to improve their written skills in English, the responses on written production and vocabulary seemed to be pointing in the positive direction.

4.2. COMPOSITION ASSESSMENT

The tool used to prove the benefits derived from the active subtitling of the participants was to assess the compositions that both groups submitted over the three terms in accordance with the aforementioned criteria for written English. Accordingly, attention was paid first of all to the control group, and the results of their assessment on the grounds of the average are illustrated below.

Figure 1. Control group written assessment.

Figure 1 demonstrates that the control group, which did not rely on any support from active subtitling, showed significant progress from the first term to the third term. In this case, the activities carried out throughout the course seem to have had a positive effect on their written English.

Regarding the experimental group, which subtitled videos actively during the school course, their results, which are also based on the average, are shown in figure 2.

Figure 2. Experimental group written assessment.

Figure 2 demonstrates that the progress shown by the experimental group in terms of written production was positive. As the first term was mainly dedicated to familiarising the students with Amara and subtitling, it was during the second term that some improvement took place, and the final marks show an improvement in their skills.

The above data show that both groups improved gradually in terms of their written skills throughout the course. However, while the control group showed progress of +0.9 from the first to the third term, the experimental group showed an improvement of +0.6.

The average calculated above takes all the results from the written assessment into account. However, the statistical measure mostly considered for the purposes of this data analysis is the median (as it highlights the central value of a series of hierarchical numbers). Tables 3 and 4 show the median of both the control and experimental groups regarding the marks obtained in the assessment.

TABLE 3Control group’s median

TABLE 4Experimental group’s median