Analysis of deletions in professional and amateur subtitles in line with functional grammar for American romance comedy Post Grad was chosen because not many studies have focused on both functional grammar and subtitling to date in Slovenia according to our count. When reviewing the literature, we found three papers dealing with this topic, namely the doctoral dissertation from Irena Kovačič from 1992, which is the first research in Slovenia, which brings together the principels of functional grammar by M. A.K. Halliday and subtitling, and the theses from Ana Beguš from 2005 and Barbara Golubovac Golob from 2008. Deletions, as well as condensatiosn and reformulations are a necessary, inevitable translation strategy in subtitling that greatly influences the viewer's understanding, so we wanted to show how the professional and amateur subtitlers are dealing with this challenge.
The theoretical part of the master’s thesis discusses the theory of subtitling and subtitling strategies, focusing on deletions and condensations, but also touches on the functional grammar model as developed by M. A. K. Halliday. This model also served as the basis for the functional model designed by Irena Kovačič, which was applied to our analysis of deletions in subtitles. Irena Kovačič distinguishes between (inter)personal, textual and ideational functions, all of which have several subcategories. The empirical part then covers an in-depth analysis of deletions found in two professional and one amateur subtitles of the American romance film Post Grad, written by Kelly Fremon Craig and directed by Vicky Jenson in 2009, in line with functional grammar.
We formulated three hypotheses, i.e. that the professional subtitles have more deletions than the amateur ones, that the number of characters, words and subtitles is inversely proportional to the number of deletions, and that the number of deletions in relation to the ideational function is the lowest and the number of deletions in relation to the (inter)personal function is the highest. We confirmed the hypotheses H1 and H3, but only partially confirmed the hypothesis H2.
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