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On Friday, October 16, Ligita Judickaitė-Pašvenskienė from the Tallinn University School of Humanities will defend her thesis, in which she analysed subtitled children’s cartoons in Lithuania from the perspectives of translation, language teaching and learning.

In Lithuania, as well as in the other two Baltic countries, subtitling is a rather underinvestigated topic of research, despite the fact that subtitling is the dominant translation mode for foreign production in cinemas and on TV. Children’s cartoons are an even more neglected topic of the field.

Translation analysis of the thesis focuses on the rendering of anthroponyms and idiomatic expressions, both of which are seen as means of foreign culture representation, from English into Lithuanian. The study shows that the Lithuanian State Language Commission functions as the norm-setting body in terms of anthroponym-translation in children’s cartoons, but in the case of names, which have semantic meaning, the tendency is to transfer the meaning in the Lithuanian subtitles rather than simply adapting them according to the rules of the State Language Commission. Therefore, the majority of semantically meaningful anthroponyms are domesticated in the target language subtitles. Judickaitė-Pašvenskienė explains: “A Semantically meaningful anthroponym, for example Storm Stinger becomes Audronius Geluonis (back-translation: Storm Sting) in the Lithuanian subtitles. As the semantic meaning of the name is transferred, it is moved closer to the target language audience, i.e. domesticated.”

In the case of idioms, the majority of source language idioms lose their idiomatic form in the subtitles: “The loss of idiomatic form means that a sentence “nothing you say makes any sense” would be translated as “Kalbi visiškas nesąmones”, and that means “You’re talking total nonsense”. Thus, only the meaning of the source language is transferred in the subtitle, the idiomatic form is lost, and therefore the Lithuanian translation is not idiomatic any more,” Judickaitė-Pašvenskienė notes.

The thesis outlines that although subtitles have the potential of enhancing English language competence, the previously described loss of idiomatic aspect in translation, cases of idiom mistranslation as well as general inaccuracies in translation pose a danger in the use of subtitled cartoons for language teaching and learning.

The author hopes that her thesis would be the starting point for a much broader, international comparative study primarily in the Baltic States since the scarcity of research into audio-visual translation is a common issue in this region.

Ligita Judickaitė-Pašvenskienė’s doctoral thesis „Cartoon Subtitling as a Mode of Translation for Children / Multifilmide subtitreerimine kui lastele suunatud tõlkevorm“ was supervised by professor Anna Verschik and professor Reili Argus from Tallinn University. Her opponents are researcher Elin Sütiste from Tartu University and associate professor Anne Lange from Tallinn University.

The doctoral thesis can be accessed from the Tallinn University Academic Library e-depository .

The public defence of the thesis will take place on October 16, 2015 at 15:00 at the Tallinn University auditorium M-213, Uus-Sadama st 5.