Quality Assessment of the English Subtitles in Five International Award-Winning Colombian Films

Abstract

The Colombian film industry is growing and gaining relevance in the international market, which demands products that comply with the highest quality standards. Consequently, a study was designed to analyze the current English subtitle quality of five Colombian films that participated in different international film festivals from 2012 to 2018 and won at least one award: La sirga by William Vega (2012), La playa D.C. by Juan Andrés Arango (2013), Tierra en la lengua by Rubén Mendoza (2014), La tierra y la sombra by César Augusto Acevedo (2015), and Niña errante by Rubén Mendoza (2018). The subtitles were examined using Pedersen’s (2017) far model to have a general overview of their quality. The results evidenced a weakness in the functional equivalence category by presenting mistranslations in many of the cultural references and idiomatic expressions, potentially affecting the audience’s reception and, therefore, jeopardizing the international success of the films. Additionally, the readability category included many segmentation and spotting errors. In general, the subtitles comply with the subtitling guidelines regarding reading speed and line length but need to improve the transmission of idiomatic expressions and the segmentation of the subtitles.

Keywords

• error analysis
• quality assessment
• Colombian films
• subtitling into English
• far model
• AVT