Applying the notion of span in audiovisual translation

Abstract

This study sets out to examine how the English pronouns are translated into the Korean subtitles. The main aim of the study is to apply the notion of span when analyzing the translation of pronouns from English into Korean. In other words, this paper would like to argue that the notion of span may well be applied in the study of personal pronouns when the source language and target language have different linguistic systems such as English and Korean. This is to emphasize and also demonstrate the fact that due to the characteristics of the Korean language, the notion of span may be an important factor proposed by Larson in 1984. The data of this study have been divided into certain spans according to certain situations between characters from the film Bridget Jones Diary 1 . The results show that the translations of Korean personal pronouns vary according to the spans between certain characters which show that the relationship changes throughout the film.