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Article published In:
Traduire, écrire, réécrire dans un monde en mutation / Writing and Translating as changing Practices: Volume I
Edited by Fayza El Qasem and Freddie Plassard
[FORUM 15:2] 2017
► pp. 288–304

Subtitling for a global audience

Handling the translation of culture-specific items in TEDx talks

| Universitat Politècnica de València

TED.com is a platform to share ideas through influential talks in video format on topics that range from science and technology to business that engages volunteers from all over the world to help transcribe, subtitle and translate their scripts in more than 100 languages. The justification to engage volunteer transcribers is that transcribed talks can reach a wider audience because they are accessible for hearing impaired individuals, can be indexed in search engines and can achieve TED’s mission of spreading ideas by making transcripts available for translation through TED’s Open Translation Project.

Therefore, talks transcribers play a crucial role in the overall translation workflow and dissemination process as they are responsible for transcribing the contents and foundations of what will be later on translated into different languages. The objective of this paper is to analyse a corpus of talks originally delivered in different variants of Spanish to identify the most common strategies used by volunteer transcribers to handle local or idiomatic expressions and culturally biased items to reach the maximum audience possible and facilitate translation.

Keywords: subtitling, translation, TEDx, localization, neutral Spanish
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.TED talks and community translation
    • 2.1Subtitling
  • 3.Culture-specific items in translation
  • 4.Analysis and discussion
    • 4.1Greetings and ways of addressing the audience
    • 4.2Culture-specific references
    • 4.3Idiomatic expressions and lexical differences
  • 5.Conclusions
  • References
Published online: 1 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/forum.15.2.07can
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