An Unexpected Hero: Reduction-based Explicitation in Avengers: Endgame
Summary
As previous research on reduction in subtitling has mainly focussed on implicitation, this thesis explores the potential of reduction-based explicitation by categorising and quantifying the ways in which it occurs in the Dutch subtitles of the film Avengers: Endgame (A. Russo & J. Russo, 2019). After determining the frequencies of explicitation and implicitation, and reduction, expansion, and the same number of characters in a total of 2,364 instances, a crosstabulation of these strategies and length outcomes finds that although implicitation-based reduction accounts for 46.2% (i.e. 1,093) of all instances, nearly 10% of all instances (i.e. 234) can be attributed to explicitation-based reduction. Close analysis of these 234 instances identifies eight patterns, which are listed from most frequent to least frequent: (1) result-oriented translations, (2) overstatements, (3) reader-oriented translations, (4) increased probability, (5) eliminated idioms and expressions, (6) overt imperatives, (7) combined subtitles, and (8) desententialisation. Further research is needed to provide both qualitative and quantitative data on the occurrence of these patterns across different films, film genres, and language pairs.