Jan Pedersen
Jan Pedersen študoval na univerzitách v Štokholme, Kodani a Uppsale. PhD obhájil na Štokholmskej univerzite v roku 2007 a v roku 2015 sa stal docentom translatológie. Jeho dizertačná práca s názvom Scandinavian Subtitles je komparatívnou štúdiou televíznych noriem titulkovania v škandinávskych krajinách. Je bývalým predsedom ESIST, členom EST a TraNor ako aj spolueditorom a spoluzakladateľom platforiem Benjamins Translation Library a Journal of Audiovisual Translation. Často vystupuje na medzinárodných konferenciách a medzi jeho publikácie patrí nielen monografia Subtitling Norms for Television (2011), ale aj viacero článkov o titulkovaní, preklade a lingvistike. Okrem toho ako titulkár dlhé roky pracuje v televízii. Jan pôsobí na Štokholmskej univerzite, kde riadi Tlmočnícky a prekladateľský inštitút a venuje sa tam výskumu a vyučovaniu audiovizuálneho prekladu.
Keynote speech:
Rehumanising Subtitling: Why humans make better subtitles than machines
Subtitling is in many ways a special form of translation. For example, the very concepts of source text and target text are different from literary, as well as most kinds of non-literary, translation in that they are polysemiotic (or multimodal). Subtitles are not target texts in themselves; they become a part of the fabric of the film and do not make sense on their own. This makes the subtitle instrumental in creating the target text. Subtitles are also transient like the speech they represent, which means that the subtitler must choose among the many and varied meanings that the source text offers and decide what to add to the source text to create a target text that can give the viewer a meaningful experience. The process of subtitling is consequently a hermeneutic activity encompassing much more than language.
The nature of subtitles and the process of subtitling make machines poor subtitlers, despite recent attempts to automate (part of) the subtitling process. Subtitles are more than written (and translated) transcripts of dialogues, and the complexities of the polysemiotic/multimodal source text make the process of subtitling unsuitable for machine translation. The algorithm-based transfer of words offered by machine translation cannot replace the creative, hermeneutic output of the subtitler, who instead becomes a post-editor, whose creativity is limited by the solutions offered by the machine, particularly as working conditions decline. Furthermore, the increased reading speeds that facilitate machine translation make for a more strenuous viewing experience. The resulting decrease in quality makes a good argument for rehumanising subtitling.