On the structure of English subtitles in select German films

Restricted until 17 May. 2011. Movie subtitles of "foreign" language films have long been a largely neglected matter, both in and of themselves and as an area of intellectual inquiry. This dissertation has as its center exhaustive line-by line analyses of portions of six feature-length German language films and their English subtitles. The goal of this inquiry is to discover and define the trends, both positive and negative, in subtitles as executed in films which have as their spoken language one that is discrete from English.; The introductory chapter presents a discussion of what a working definition of a subtitle can be and how it should optimally function. Critical characteristics of what a subtitle must satisfy in order to be considered successful are developed. In order to facilitate the analysis of the phenomena encountered during this line-by-line study, structural categories are defined. The introductory chapter closes with a discussion of why the potential contributions inherent in subtitled film are important to our troubled planet, as well as a summary of the limited amount of research on this topic to date.; The main body of this dissertation applies the aforementioned structural categories of additions, omissions, substitutions, orthography, profanity, and the elusive matter of style to categorize errant subtitle phenomena. The concluding chapter summarizes the findings and presents a prognosis and suggestions for future subtitling as well as for future research.