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This is a contribution from Between Text and Image. Updating research in screen translation. Edited by Delia Chiaro, Christine Heiss and Chiara Bucaria. © 2008. John Benjamins Publishing Company This electronic file may not be altered in any way. The author(s) of this article is/are permitted to use this PDF file to generate printed copies to be used by way of offprints, for their personal use only. Permission is granted by the publishers to post this file on a closed server which is accessible to members (students and staff) only of the author’s/s’ institute, it is not permitted to post this PDF on the open internet. For any other use of this material prior written permission should be obtained from the publishers or through the Copyright Clearance Center (for USA: www.copyright.com). Please contact [email protected] or consult our website: www.benjamins.com Tables of Contents, abstracts and guidelines are available at www.benjamins.com

Subtitles and line-breaks Towards improved readability Elisa Perego

University of Trieste, Italy Psycholinguistic literature shows that reading is so highly structured and formalized as to make it a routine and automated task. So long as the syntax and lexicon of the text both remain within normal variation, the flow of reading is not interrupted. When accustomed patterns are violated, this produces an immediate and substantial increase in the level of strain placed upon the reader. This paper focuses specifically on the difficulties that film subtitle readers may encounter as a result of arbitrary line-breaks, i.e. text segmentation that does not follow the principal rules of syntax. A qualitative analysis on a varied corpus of film subtitles allowed us to identify instances of arbitrary line-breaks, to comment on them and to formulate hypotheses concerning possible ways to resolve such issues by employing a more suitable target-oriented subtitle layout. Keywords: subtitling, parsing, segmentation, reading, quality

Introduction This study is a reflection on the possible effects of line-breaks on subtitle readability and usability. It offers evidence that subtitle processing might be enhanced by careful segmentation of lines, i.e. a segmentation that is made in accordance with the principal rules of syntax. Although our considerations technically relate to film subtitles (cf. Table 1), they might also be extended to cover all other types of audiovisual subtitles. We have carried out a qualitative analysis of text distribution over more than one line. This enabled us to detect various types of unusual or arbitrary line-breaks in film subtitles. Instances of arbitrary line-breaks were then grouped according to the traditional micro- to macro-levels of language organization (i.e. word to sentence) with the aim of conducting further research with regard to how serious each of them is as a violation of both common syntactic patterns and readability criteria. This should be carried out by experiments to record eye-movement, which © 2008. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

 Elisa Perego

is known to be the best way of studying behaviour and the reading process (Rayner and Pollatsek 1989; cf. Praet et al. 1990). User satisfaction surveys, however, might also be considered as a means of testing whether arbitrary line-breaks might be detrimental to fluent reading and inhibit readers’ satisfaction. We believe that readability issues deserve to be addressed and explored primarily for the benefit of the audience making use of audiovisual products. This could include viewers, who deserve to have access to a quality product and to enjoy it fully without being unduly aware of or disturbed by subtitles. Other groups who merit consideration are second language learners, for whom a coherent and comprehensible organization of information can contribute to transforming complex input into intake, thus enhancing the mechanisms of language learning (cf. Krashen 1982, 1985, Long 1996, Caimi 2002); and, last but not least, deaf and hearingimpaired viewers, for whom readability is a prerequisite for accessing any sort of audiovisual product.1 For all these reasons, improving subtitle quality in both typically subtitling countries, as well as in any predominantly dubbing country (of which Italy is one among many), is not only worthwhile but necessary. 1. Subtitling and reading On the whole, multiple parameters need to be taken into account in order to deliver user-friendly subtitles. The general requirements for subtitle display are those of rhythm, visibility, layout and sequencing. Considerable importance is placed on most of these criteria in the specialized literature, and most are duly respected by subtitlers. Nevertheless, to the author’s knowledge there appears to be a tendency to disregard subtitle line-breaks both in theory and in practice. The literature on this specific topic is limited (d’Ydewalle et al. 1985: 379, Ivarsson and Carroll 1998: 76–78, Karamitroglou 1998, Rundle 2000, Díaz Cintas 2001a: 120–121, 2003, Perego 2005: 57–58) and all films analyzed (Table 1) present instances of arbitrary line-breaks at different levels. In particular, the issues of preferred line number per subtitle flash,2 disposition and breaking have been addressed in the literature in such a way as to show that we still have no established unanimously recognized and valid criteria, and perhaps never will, given the uniqueness of each subtitling situation and the tendency to rely upon the subtitler’s expertise and common 1. The different requirements of this heterogeneous community and the specific features of subtitles meant for a hearing-impaired audience will not be tackled here for lack of space. See de Linde and Kay 1999, among many, for further details on this topic. 2. With the expression “subtitle flash” we refer to a single uninterrupted one or two-line subtitle shot that appears on the screen between specific in and out times.

© 2008. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

Subtitles and line-breaks 

sense. Nevertheless, we would suggest that knowing how the reading process works can be helpful in determining the most effective ways of segmenting a text. Reading is a highly complex perceptual cognitive activity that consists in acquiring information from a written source. It involves a number of inter-related processes: readers decode a written text by accessing, identifying and holistically combining letters into words, words into phrases and phrases into sentences. This is an essential process in understanding written texts which is known as parsing (Coltheart 1987, Frazier 1987, Holmes 1987: 587, Rayner and Pollatsek 1989, Ferreira and Henderson 1995: 120). Normally readers analyze (i.e. parse) written texts automatically in terms of syntax (Flores d’Arcais 1987). They do not read word by word but in chunks, i.e. word-groups corresponding to syntactic units (Coltheart 1987), they structure linguistic input grammatically during comprehension (Frazier 1987: 560) and recognize particular syntactic configurations while reading (Holmes 1987: 587–588). Subtitle readers find themselves in a particularly complex perceptual situation. The process of viewing a subtitled film entails a situation where “the same verbal information may be available at the same time in two modalities: speech and printed text” (d’Ydewalle et al. 1991: 650) i.e. readers of subtitles are provided with extra, multi-semiotic stimuli in contrast to readers of text alone. The former divide their attention between visual stimuli (which are both linguistic and spatial, in the form of reading and watching respectively) and auditory information (listening to the soundtrack) (Grillo and Kawin 1981: 27, d’Ydewalle et al. 1987: 313, Gielen and d’Ydewalle 1991). This is a complex skill which calls for repeated switching mechanisms from text to image and vice versa (d’Ydewalle et al. 1987). It is therefore important to guarantee an appropriate presentation layout as well as time to allow for the smooth processing of subtitles (d’Ydewalle et al. 1987) and to limit any possible disruption in meaning and text processing. Film reception is affected by the way subtitles are displayed, especially when a subtitle flash comprises two lines (Karamitroglou 1998). In the present study we consider both one- and two-line subtitles split over different flashes, as opposed to selfcontained monolineal or bilineal subtitles, and focus on text distribution over lines in terms of syntactic breaking. In doing so, we merge the traditional theories of syntax and models of reading behaviour to assess how the former can affect the latter. 2. Premises Since subtitles, like any other text, present the reader with a linear structure of sentences, the reader is supposed to analyse them automatically in terms of syntax, as normally happens during silent reading. In view of the fact that perceivers © 2008. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

 Elisa Perego

construct a grammatical representation of sentences during comprehension (Frazier 1987), and that the way in which linguistic information is laid out affects to some extent the way it is processed (Henderson et al. 1995, Huang et al. 2003, Rayner et al. 2006), we hypothesize that abnormal layout would be particularly disruptive in a subtitle reading situation as well. This is a situation where (1) reading is not self-paced, (2) subtitles are automatically read by all viewers, including those who know the spoken language (d’Ydewalle et al. 1987, 1991), (3) the average presentation time is not equally suitable for all viewers, (4) the presentation time and the spotting3 for each subtitle flash are occasionally not ideal, and (5) a number of other constraints combine to make subtitle reading a challenging and stressful perceptual activity. In particular, we would suggest that subtitle reading may be particularly demanding when the line-break is arbitrary, with the term ‘arbitrary’ standing for unpredictable, illogical, inaccurate or implausible. Line-break is arbitrary when coherent groups of words are split and segmentation does not coincide with the highest syntactic node (Karamitroglou 1998). We assume these conditions to be disruptive because they may (1) favour conscious confusion or garden pathing (cf. Holmes 1987, Spivey-Knowlton et al. 1995), i.e. the wrong interpretation of a syntactically ambiguous sentence; (2) produce spillover effects (cf. Rayner and Morris 1990, Wilbertz et al. 1991), i.e. unwanted sideeffects or complications “represented by increased gaze duration not on the critical word itself, but on the one next to it” (Wilbertz et al. 1991: 353); and (3) imply difficult text-processing, resulting in extra eye fixations,4 a larger number of unnecessary eye regressions and corrective movements (cf. Rayner and Pollatsek 1987: 329; Rayner et al. 2006). It is therefore possible that all this would hinder readability and a smooth line-to-line transition. This, in turn, could also force reanalysis and make it necessary to abandon the current interpretation (or analysis) of the sentence in order to reformulate it (Frazier 1987: 571). Although the subtitler, responsible for creating easily readable subtitles, ought to resort to all possible strategies to avoid any ambiguity (Díaz Cintas 2001a: 120), discontinuity at different levels of constituency has been detected in all the subtitled films analyzed.

3. The specialized terms spotting, cuing or timing are typically used as synonyms and “describe the process of defining the in and out times of individual subtitles” (Ivarsson and Carroll 1998: 178). 4. During reading, our eyes do not move smoothly across the page. They “make a series of jumps […] along the line. Between the jumps the eyes remain relatively still, for about a quarter of a second, in what is referred to as a fixation” (Rayner and Pollatsek 1989: 6, original italics).


Subtitles and line-breaks 

In this paper we shall discuss a few representative instances of arbitrarily broken subtitles taken from a heterogeneous corpus (Table 1). We selected these particular films because they represent a stratified sample in terms of release time (from the early 60s to the present day), they comprise different source and target languages (English, Dutch, German, Italian and Hungarian), and they include subtitles prepared for different media (cinema and DVD) as well as different film genres. We expect such a heterogeneous corpus to provide sufficiently unbiased results. Table 1. Corpus Type of subtitles

Film details

Italian & English DVD subtitles (for distribution in Italy)

The Graduate, Mike Nichols, 1967 (Drama/Comedy) Annie Hall, Woody Allen, 1977 (Comedy/Romance) Saturday Night Fever, John Badham, 1977 (Drama/Music) East is East, Damien O’Donnell, 1999 (Comedy) Snow Falling on Cedars, Scott Hicks, 1999 (Thriller) The Talented Mr Ripley, Anthony Minghella, 1999 (Drama/ Thriller) About a Boy, Chris & Paul Weitz, 2002 (Comedy)

Italian subtitles for cinema (Ombrelettriche)

E-Dreams, Wonsuk Chin, 2001 (Documentary) Confituur [Sweet Jam], Lieven Debrauwer, 2004 (Drama/ Comedy) Sideways, Alexander Payne, 2004 (Comedy/Drama) The Phantom of the Opera, Joel Schumacher, 2004 (Drama/ Fantasy)

Italian DVD subtitles (Ombrelettriche)*

Herz aus Glas [Heart of glass], Werner Herzog, 1976 (Drama)

Italian subtitles for cinema (Hungarian National Film Archive)

Szerelem [Love], Károly Makk, 1970 (Drama) Szerelmesfilm [Love film], István Szabó, 1970 (Drama)

Hungarian subtitles for cinema (Hungarian National Film Archive)

Mamma Roma, Pierpaolo Pasolini, 1962 (Drama)

* Ombrelettriche is a subtitling company founded in Rome in 1994 and run by Elvira De Majo. See www.ombrelettriche.com for additional information.


 Elisa Perego

3. Analysis and discussion Linear discontinuity has been observed both at phrase and clause level. Indisputably, long stretches of text necessarily have to be split somewhere. Moreover, subtitling is open to a large number of technical constraints. In this paper, we should like to specifically highlight the line-break issue in the hope that, as long as other technical constraints are respected, they will be taken more seriously into account by subtitlers whose final aim is high quality and target-orientedness. Since Rayner and colleagues (2006: 321) have demonstrated “the importance of the continued presence of the word to the right of fixation […] and possibly throughout a fixation in its entirety, in order for fluent reading to occur”, we assume that phrases could be best processed if presented as homogeneous chunks according to their orderly arrangement. Such a layout presumably allows the perceiver to take them in with a single fixation: “[r]eaders obtain significant preview benefit from the word to the right of fixation, and when it is disrupted in some way, reading suffers” (Rayner et al. 2006: 321). Nevertheless, much of the subtitling analyzed fails to show consideration for the conceptually autonomous structure of phrases or multiword sequences. This flaw may be responsible for contingent disruptions and for reductions to reading speed in the form of garden-pathing or spill-over phenomena. 3.1

Noun phrases

In order to reduce such phenomena, frequent instances of determiner-head or pre-modifier-head splitting in noun phrases (underlined in 1 to 4) should perhaps be reduced to a minimum. (1) Exactly how do you mean? – There’s a great future there. Think about it.

(Graduate)

(2) You only talked about your married sister. And your other married sister.

(Saturday)

(3) So we were always stuck watching some crap made-for-TV movie about a kid with leukaemia. (About) (4) Like hell! 25 years in construction work. I’ve always had a paycheque.

(Saturday)

Presenting visibly comprehensible input might help optimize response processes, without impacting on the potentially positive effects of subtitling as a means of access to (foreign or same language) audiovisual productions.


Subtitles and line-breaks 

On the other hand, modifiers that follow the head noun are supposed to be easily processed even if separated from it and moved to a new line (e.g., “of yours” in example 5). Their relation with the head is usually more distant than that of premodifiers. (5) Hey. I want this job of yours, Tommy

(Ripley)

Also, words are not independent of each other, and different levels of fixity or idiomaticity exist (Cruse 1986, Casadei 1995, Sinclair 1996, Cowie 1998, Jackson and Zé Amvela 2000, Gramley and Pätzold 2004). Especially in a reading situation that puts perceivers under pressure, then, it would be useful to make the best possible use of layout. In other words, it might be useful to visually respect the consistency of the expressions that speakers feel are typical or conventional (Casadei 1995: 344, Gramley and Pätzold 2004: 55), and of those expressions whose constituents are constrained in terms of co-occurrence and distribution (Casadei 1995: 344). In particular, we argue that it might be advantageous for subtitlers to be sensitive to the different degrees of lexico-semantic and syntactic fixity, crystallization and frequent co-occurrences (i.e. collocations, cf. Sinclair 1996: 89) in order to avoid the disturbing effect of violating customary patterns as, for example, in (6) and (7), where “martedì scorso” and “un essere vivente” are fairly stable word combinations (cf. Cowie 1998). (6)

Ho visto il film di Fellini martedì scorso. Non è uno dei suoi migliori. I saw the Fellini film last Tuesday. It is not one of his best.

(7)

Non posso mettere un essere vivente nell’acqua bollente! I can’t put a living thing in hot water!

(Annie Hall)

(Annie Hall)

The same pertains to idiomatic expressions, whose processing is different from single-word processing. Understanding an idiom requires going beyond simple word-by-word comprehension so as to integrate figurative meaning into contextual information (Levorato et al. 2004; see also Nippold and Duthie 2003). Splitting an idiomatic expression, as in the case underlined in (8), would therefore force the reader to interpret its constituents literally in the first instance, and then to reconsider their analysis in a second phase. This may be reasonably linked to the Minimal Attachment Principle whereby “readers assign phrasal structure to a


 Elisa Perego

word string so that the ‘simplest’ structure results” (Frazier 1987: 561–562; cf. also Holmes 1987: 588). In view of that, we can observe (8). (8)

Perché sapevo che avresti dato i numeri e non saremmo partiti! Because I knew you would have gone mad and we wouldn’t have left!

(Sideways)

The transitive verb dare ‘to give’ at the very end of the upper line would call for the presence of a non-figurative direct object after it (cf. dare qualcosa a qualcuno ‘to give something to someone’). Readers who eventually encounter the noun phrase i numeri (lit. ‘numbers’, but cf. dare i numeri ‘to go mad’) will presumably have to spend a longer time to disambiguate the meaning of the idiomatic expression dare i numeri. 3.2

Prepositional phrases

We noted that, technically, presenting prepositional phrases in a row should not be a problem, since both simple and complex prepositions are short enough to be moved around conveniently without upsetting the established norms governing the maximum number of characters per line. However prepositional phrases are not necessarily displayed in order to help the reader. This is illustrated and underlined in (9) and (10). Two alternatives (a. and b.) are given to each original arbitrarily broken subtitle, where the hanging preposition might be distractive. Patently, in most instances at least one of the alternatives, and often both, would do. They respect characters-per-line conventions (the figures are given in parentheses in the examples below), coherent segmentation (whereby the preposition is not separated from its complement [Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 603–606, 620–621]) and preferred line layouts. Curiously, this consideration could raise the question of why alternative text organization patterns were not considered in these cases (cf. note 5). (9) There was a letter from (23) Dickie in with my perfume. (26) a. There was a letter (18) from Dickie in with my perfume (30) b. There was a letter from Dickie (30) in with my perfume (18) (10)

… nel portabatterie della (25) barca di Myamoto? – Certo. (26) … in the battery well of the boat of Myamoto? – Sure.


(Ripley)

(Snow)

Subtitles and line-breaks 

a. b.

… nel portabatterie (19) della barca di Myamoto? – Certo. (32) … nel portabatterie della barca (31) di Myamoto? – Certo. (20)

It may happen, of course, that no best options are available, and it is not possible to achieve any truly suitable line-break with the same linguistic material, as in (11). Here, the distribution of characters is unbalanced from the start and remains so even if recourse is made to different phrase arrangements (cf. a. and b.). (11) I was having lunch with some guys from (38) NBC. So I said “Did you eat yet or what?” (41) (Annie Hall) a. I was having lunch with some guys (33) from NBC. So I said “Did you eat yet or what?” (46) b. I was having lunch with some guys from NBC. (43) So I said “Did you eat yet or what?” (36) In such cases, a possible effective solution would be rephrasing, i.e. saying the same thing with different (and possibly fewer) words, and rethinking the distribution of the whole text.5 However, this raises the question of whether exceeding the accepted number of characters per line, i.e. slightly manipulating technical constraints, might nonetheless be considered a possible alternative to arbitrary splitting whenever the original linguistic material does not allow for suitable alternatives and rephrasing has to be ruled out. 3.3

Verb phrases

In line with what has been suggested thus far, verb groups are supposed to maintain their own graphic consistency too, by maintaining the main verb and its auxiliaries well coupled visually and not disjoined over different lines. Examples (12) to (15) show that a contrary trend is often at work in cases where either plain auxiliaries or modals are used (cf. 12 and 13). This, though, also occurs when structurally and semantically fixed verb patterns (e.g. causative structures and phraseological 5. It appears that this is the way subtitlers work in typical subtitling countries, where the practice is well-established and quality is a primary concern (I would like to thank Henrik Gottlieb for confirming this for me). Nevertheless, the process of message reformulation is a complex and time-consuming one, and a number of subtitlers in Italy are of the opinion that formulating and considering different options is unfortunately an unaffordable ‘luxury’ under typical current working conditions (Serena Paccagnella, personal communication). Hence the need to investigate the possible connection between subtitlers’ working habits and environment and their linguistic choices, as per a recent study on dubbing (Pavesi and Perego, forthcoming).


 Elisa Perego

verbs) are at stake (cf. 14 and 15), even though their breaking could cause a great degree of irritation to the reader. (12) Do you have a grudge against me? Do you feel a strong resentment? – No!

(Graduate)

(13)

Glielo dirò, ma forse dovrai accontentarti delle patatine. I’ll tell him, but perhaps you’ll have to be satisfied with chips.

(14)

Mai un solo francobollo, ti fanno fare la fila per 3! Aspettate da molto? (Ripley) One stamp is never enough, they make you queue for three! Have you been waiting for long?

(15)

È una bomba, e tu stavi per dirle che mi sposo! She’s terrific, and you were about to tell her I’m getting married!

3.4

(East)

(Sideways)

The sentence level

Moving on to sentence level, the literature shows that sentences are more easily read if each clause or sentence takes up a single line of a two-line subtitle flash (Mayoral 1993: 56, Ivarsson and Carroll 1998: 78, Díaz Cintas 2001a: 120, 2003). However, we were able to identify arbitrary text segmentations in the presence of coordinators and subordinators. Both are often separated from the clause they introduce, although they are naturally closer and belong more to that than to the root clause (Fabb 1994, Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 1277). Interestingly, instances of both arbitrary and satisfactory segmentations sometimes co-exist in the same film(s) (cf. 16 and 17). (16)

Questa è la chiave e vorrei risuolare queste scarpe. This is the key and I’d like to resole these shoes.

(17)

Come puoi fare la marmellata e fingere che non sia successo niente? How can you make jam and pretend nothing happened?


(Confituur)

(Confituur)

Subtitles and line-breaks 

This could be interpreted either as betraying a lack of sufficiently strict in-house subtitling guidelines in subtitling companies, scant attention or underestimation of the problem on the part of the subtitler, or indeed excessive reliance upon subtitling programmes which split lines exclusively according to pre-defined technical instructions. Looking back at the two examples above, the former (16) might well be preferable to the latter (17), where the sentential conjunction e ‘and’ functions as a nontarget stimulus. The position of the conjunction presumably activates in the reader the expectation of a new sentence which does not come right after it, but on a different line. This circumstance could produce an unwanted effect on reading time, though not necessarily on comprehension. The same applies to all coordinators and to subordinators. In particular, we found evidence that default ‘all purpose’ markers of subordination, for instance, are not systematically shifted to the second line as expected (Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 1056–1057) (see 18, 19). (18)

Oggi sono 14.600 giorni che Tuur ed Emma stanno insieme, Today it’s been 14.600 days that Tuur and Emma are together,6

(19) And your third married sister. I felt that you just wanted to be a married sister.

(Confituur)

(Saturday)

Interestingly enough, although our analysis is not a quantitative one, it seems that more attention is paid to relative rather than to default subordinators: the former appear misplaced only occasionally, the latter much more frequently. This might be ascribed to a clearer perception of relative clauses as an indivisible adjectivelike constituent (cf. Fabb 1994: 92, Yule 1998: 240, Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 1058). Except in a scant number of examples, then, relative pronouns are not normally separated from the clauses to which they naturally (i.e. syntactically, semantically and prosodically) belong (20). (20)

Saleem, dov’è il vestito che ti ho preso per la scuola? Saleem, where’s the dress that I bought you for school?

(East)

In the presence of if- and comparative constructions, a tendency has been observed in the former case to disrupt the integrity of the clause that contains the 6. i.e. ‘Today, Tuur and Emma have been together for 14,600 days’. We have provided a literal translation, awkward though it may be, to suggest the effect of the dangling subordinator in the original.


 Elisa Perego

if-element, in cases where it follows the clause that expresses what will happen if the hypothesis expressed in the if-sentence is fulfilled, thus splitting off the if-element from the remainder of the clause (21). (21)

Quello che ci serve è un frigorifero. Se sei d’accordo ti sarò per sempre amica. What we need is a fridge. If you agree, I’ll always be your friend.

(Ripley)

Finally, with comparative constructions, we assume that eye-strain could be caused when comparative conjunctions (che, di and a in Italian, than in English) preceding the clause they introduce are not visually attached to it (22) despite an alternative line-break being possible that is satisfactory and complies with technical criteria (22 a). (22) #Sono le uve Syrah più vecchie di# #Santa Barbara County, lo sapevate?# #These are the oldest Syrah grapes in # #Santa Barbara County, did you know that?# a. #Sono le uve Syrah più vecchie # #di Santa Barbara County, lo sapevate?#

(Sideways)

4. Concluding remarks Specialized literature in the field of cognitive psychology shows that the reading process relies heavily on sequential and holistic procedures. If the reader has to stop and consciously identify a word, then the reading flow may be halted. In this paper we argue that this could also be the case when reading subtitles. A failure to edit the target text appropriately, specifically with regard to arbitrarily broken lines, has nonetheless been observed throughout a heterogeneous corpus. A few instances of arbitrary text segmentation have been presented and commented on here. This has allowed us to illustrate an aspect of subtitling which, as long as other technical constraints are also respected, might be taken into more serious consideration. Furthermore, this work lays the foundation to further research designed to shed light on three specific issues: 1. whether subtitle layout truly has an effect on reading behaviour 2. whether syntactic constraints should prevail over technical ones 3. why text segmentation is often arbitrary


Subtitles and line-breaks 

Empirical evidence (i.e. eye-movement recording in a subtitling environment) and user satisfaction surveys would help shed light on viewers’ actual preferences. Furthermore, we believe that interviewing professional subtitlers would help to focus on the connections between their working habits and routines and the development of specific issues that have been observed in subtitles (cf. Pavesi and Perego, 2006 and 2008).
