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Part of
Translation in Transition: Human and machine intelligence
Edited by Isabel Lacruz
[American Translators Association Scholarly Monograph Series XX] 2023
► pp. 130–156

Chapter 7
Subtitling in transition

The case of TED Talks

| Fondazione Bruno Kessler | University of Trento
| University of Warwick | University of the Free State

One of the largest projects of volunteer subtitling is the TED Talk Translators programme, with more than 3000 talks subtitled in 115 languages, the programme has been constantly adapting to respond to the increasing popularity of TED Talks with a robust quality assurance process, training material and adoption of tools. In this work, we pose the question of whether this constant transition and refinement of the workflows has an effect on the quality of the subtitles and their adequacy. Our corpus-based investigation using subtitling and linguistic features provides evidence in favour of a chronological transition from a “plain” translation of the source transcript, which does not consider subtitling constraints, to well-formed subtitles.

Keywords: subtitling, length, TED, non-professional, volunteer, interjections, discourse markers
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1The TED translators programme
    • 2.2TED Translators workflow and contributors
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Data
    • 3.2Methodology
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Length conformity
    • 4.2Mean subtitle length and reading speed
    • 4.3Interjections
    • 4.4Features of oral discourse
    • 4.5Cross-lingual analysis of features of oral discourse
      • So
      • I mean
      • Oh
      • Now
      • Right?
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • TED Talks
  • Appendix
Published online: 26 July 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ata.xx.07kar
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TED Talks

Scott Kim
2008 “The art of puzzles.” [URL]
Nuland, Sherwin
2001 “How electroshock therapy changed me.” [URL]