Anna Karenina Movie in a Mirror of English Language Education

Nikolai, N Nikandrov; Fumihiro, Takase

Article

Journal of English Teaching through Movies and Media 2013;14(2):107-134.
Published online September 30, 2013.

Anna Karenina Movie in a Mirror of English Language Education

Abstract

English subtitles from the movie Anna Karenina have been analyzed for English words, parts of speech, grammar, sentence representatives and, then, have been compared with the English language translation version (ELTV) of the original script. The subtitles appear to be about one fourth or fifth of the length of conversational part of the ELTV. They include all basic sentence patterns and are highly saturated with conversations: about 80 words or up to 15 sentences are "spoken" per minute. Every fourth or fifth sentence is a question. 30% of the subtitles are represented by negative or exclamatory style sentences. Parts of speech like verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions, combinations of which traditionally characterize a variety of texts, are widely presented and cover about 25.7%, 16.2%, 12.2%, and 2.9%, of the subtitles' word list. The investigation of subtitles has also indicated that they remain quite faithful to the ELTVs and original story in both key dialogs and total text. About 60-76% of the investigated part of the movie subtitles is completely or nearly identical to the conversational part of the ELTV. The implementation of this visual material for English language teaching and its intercultural impact on pupils are discussed.

Key Words: English language education;visual materials;subtitles