The codification of non-verbal information in subtitled texts

This article focuses on the semiotic nature of film texts and their translation. Films are multi-channel and multi-code systems of communication forcing translators to consider the overall text structure. This shapes the way they re-codify the target text, whose chief semiotic channel of communication (written) is different from that of the original (oral). Hence the description of subtitling as a diasemiotic translation: what is oral in the original version becomes written in the translation, and it is this written text that takes on the semantic load. At times, the semantic load of non-verbal signs accompanying speech is much more significant than that of the spoken text itself. In such cases the subtitler should make those signs available to the foreign-language audience. Three films have been analysed in order to illustrate how non-verbal information can be restored in subtitles