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Character voice in subtitles: a case study of the Japanese subtitles of The Witcher

In storytelling, one of the most important functions of dialogue is to create characterisation. Character voice is each character's unique style of speaking, which can impart explicit or implicit information about characters, such as their personality, age, or gender. Japanese language texts are known to use gendered language and role language (yakuwarigo) as a way of creating characterisation and character voice.This case study examines the English dialogue and the Japanese subtitles of four characters (Tissaia, Yennefer, Geralt, and Jaskier) from the series The Witcher. The aim was to categorize the strategies used to recreate the original character voice, to mark the differences in the character voices, and to examine their possible impact on the overall characterisations. The study concludes that the main strategy in creating character voice was gendered language and role language. Overall, the English and Japanese character voices were roughly equivalent with each other, and the used gendered language was supported by the characters’ personalities or appearance. The character Jaskier had the most differences between his English and Japanese dialogue, most likely due to the difficulties in recreating his brand of humorous tone in subtitle form.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:du-37461
Date January 2021
CreatorsRusanen, Sirius
PublisherHögskolan Dalarna, Institutionen för språk, litteratur och lärande
Source SetsDiVA Archive at Upsalla University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeStudent thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text
Formatapplication/pdf
Rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

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