My research lies within the field of descriptive translation studies, and more specifically subtitling and the “subtitler’s voice”/the "subtitler's unique fingerprint", or that which each individual translator/subtitler brings to his or her subtitled text. I am both studying translational norms and the concept of voice in translation. The area is made even more interesting because of the film text’s special polysemiotic construction together with the added synchronous message conveyed by the subtitled text itself. Taking the norms guiding subtitling into special consideration, my aim is to study what an individual subtitler can bring to the translated/subtitled text as such and what such a unique voice may look like; or to put it in more generalizable terms, what indicators could/should be studied when one wants to study a subtitler’s voice? As I am not only interested in norm-governed behaviour but also in individuality, I have chosen to study subtitles based on fiction films rather than on news programmes or documentaries, where individuality seems to be less accepted when it comes to subtitling.
In addition to analysing the whole polysemiotic text (film text and subtitles), I will conduct interviews with subtitlers as a way of finding out more about how they see their role as subtitlers and the way they relate their work to norms, individuality, collaboration, etc.