The Creation of Interlingual Subtitles: A Method of Improving Foreign Language Skills
The Creation of Interlingual Subtitles: A Method of Improving Foreign Language Skills

Summary/Abstract: This paper analyses the role of creating interlingual subtitles as a practical and instructive activity in the acquisition of a foreign language. The learners we refer to are the Romanian students situated at C1 level proficiency in English. For our analysis we take as example a fragment of a 2.32-minute length from the documentary Fractals: The Colors of Infinity presented by Arthur C. Clarke. When the students translate the voices heard in the film clip from the source language (i.e. English) into the mother tongue (i.e. Romanian) they have an active role in their own learning process, so that their foreign language acquisition is improved. While they are listening attentively to an audiovisual material, the students are trying to find out the equivalents or the close synonyms of the source language lexical items in their mother tongue: e.g. since the documentary Fractals: The Colors of Infinity includes terms from domains such as mathematics, physical sciences and computer graphics, the students acquire a specialized vocabulary. Consequently, the act of translating an audiovisual material from the source language into the mother tongue may stimulate the students' interest in improving their foreign language skills.

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