FRANCÊS

The objective of this project was to produce French subtitles for ENCIDIS videos within the scope of the activities of the University Extension Program of the Translation Laboratory of the Universidade Federal Fluminense (LABESTRAD).

Specifically, we aim to:

– Train potential translators able to handle technologies for the translation and subtitling of videos;

– Disseminate academic content produced in Brazil, not usually accessed because of the lack of subtitles in a foreign language, in our case, French;

– Promote academic literacy with the use of translation of relevant content for the training of students involved in translation studies and French as a Foreign Language (FLE – Francês como Língua Estrangeira);

– Foster transdisciplinarity by means of the articulation of activities in the area of language studies with other areas of knowledge.

– Promote research and production of students involved in the project.

In the process of subtitling the video-recordings of the Audiovisual Encyclopedia into French, we adopted the four stages of subtitling, according to studies by Martinez (2007):

1. Transcription and/or description of the video, it is the first contact with the work material, when one has a global understanding of the video and its content and, from the video transcription/description, one has a deeper understanding of the theme.
2. Interlingual/intralingual translation refers to ‘diagonal translation’, that is, the double translation procedure the oral text goes through until subtitles are produced. The video text will be translated from the source language to the target language and then adjustments will be made from oral speech to written speech (condensation/reduction).
3. Spotting is the stage when subtitles are inserted and edited. The technical parameters vary, adapting to the project developed, to the target audience and to the placement of the video. Therefore, researchers in the area have established parameters to facilitate the reception of subtitles in Brazil, such as: font, color, size, number of lines, position, format, speed, duration and marking. For this project, the following criteria were adopted: – yellow color with black shading; – Tahoma font – bold style; – size 14; max. two lines; – max. 37 characters per line; – central position at the bottom; – max. 18 characters per second; – min. 1 sec and max. 6 sec.
4. Review is made by the subtitler, by the LABESTRAD coordinator and by a reviewer external to LABESTRAD. It is at this very important stage that the reviewers check typos and agreement errors, linguistic adequacy to the French language, technical standards for subtitles and Discourse Analysis specific questions.

For that purpose, in the subtitling process, the choices are:

– Eliminate spoken language marks (discursive markers) or even repetition of terms and expressions;

– Follow the rules of writing punctuation according to the speaker’s intonation cues;

– Reorder phrases and sentences according to the specificities of the French language;

– Adapt informal speech to formal written text;

– Fix phonetic deviations and visual inconsistencies.

Labestrad – Laboratório de Estudos da Tradução da UFF
Rua Prof. Marcos Waldemar de Freitas, s/no. Campus do Gragoatá – Bloco C – sala 328
Niterói, RJ – CEP 24210-201