Film-Untertitel als Quelle eines quasi-mündlichen Parallelkorpus?

Daniel Bunčić

In contrast to monolingual corpora, for which transcripts of oral communication are nowadays increasingly available, parallel corpora are still seriously biased towards written texts. An approach to counter this bias might be the inclusion of movie subtitles, which can be extracted from DVDs. Therefore this paper examines in how far subtitles represent orality, which is understood in the sense of “language of proximity” in Koch/Oesterreicher’s (1985) framework. For the analysis the creation of multilingual subtitles is broken down into three steps: the fictionalization of movie dialogue in contrast to real dialogue; the change of medium from the sound track to the subtitle; and the translation from the original language to the target languages. The result of this analysis on the basis of a tiny test corpus of subtitles is that despite some adaptations for better readability, subtitles exhibit the “language of proximity” to a great extent and can therefore provide a suitable counter-balance for written parallel corpora.

Linguistische Beiträge zur Slavistik: XIX. JungslavistInnen-Treffen in Berlin, 16.–18. Dezember 2010. Hg. Luka Szucsich, Natalia Gagarina, Elena Gorishneva und Joanna Leszkowicz. München, Berlin, Washington: Sagner 2012 (Specimina Philologiae Slavicae, 171). 49–69.