영상 시각 기호와 의미 전달

Visual Codes and Meaning Transfer - with Special Emphasis on Film Subtitling

Nowadays we experience sharing our messages by the transmission devices through the screen. The visual codes on the screen are considered as more important factors than in the past. Particularly, in the subtitling of films, they deliver part of the plots of a film in place of the actors utterances. This study is intended to focus on the role played in the subtitling of the target text. Most of all, it argues that one of visual codes occupies part of the messages. The researches for the role of visual codes in subtitling have already been conducted by several scholars. Chaume(2004) classified visual codes as moving, linguistic, photographic, paralinguistic, and iconograhic code in the screen components. Thus, Küssmaul(2005) argued that visual codes substituted parts of utterances and assisted them. Previously Barthes(1964) and Saussure(1962) observed that signifiant and signifie as the first language formed denotation, and depending on utterance context or subjective judgement, they could form connotation. These facts make room for the transfer relations between visual codes and messages. In other words, as Küssmaul(2005) studied, visual codes in the source text were assigned on the target text properly in congruency with the utterance situation. On the basis on these researches, this study investigated three American-English films with Korean subtitles, Pride & Prejudice(2005), Lake House(2006), Something s Gotta give(2003). Most of the subtitle translations by visual codes corresponded to the target text directly. These results implied that visual codes played a role to deliver the messages and solve the ambiguity of them explicitly. We can acknowledge that visual codes in subtitling of screen translations not only play an assistant role but also replace some message.