An Investigation Into the Collocations of the English Subtitles of Korean Movies

Park, Myongsu

Article

Journal of English Teaching through Movies and Media 2017;18(3):51-69.
Published online August 30, 2017.

An Investigation Into the Collocations of the English Subtitles of Korean Movies

Abstract

This study examined the corpus of English subtitles of the translated Korean movies to investigate the use of collocations in the subtitles and compared them with the corpus of dialogues of Hollywood movie scripts. The researcher used Collogram, a handy tool dedicated to analyzing collocations in corpora, focusing on translated Korean movies in comparison with English movies. The General Service Collocation (GSC) lists of Collogram were used to analyze the quantity and range of the collocations in the corpora. The study found that the English subtitles of the translated movies showed a similar tendency in their collocational range as the top five lists. These made up a majority of collocates in both corpora with 83 percent and 85 coverage of the total collocations, respectively. Even though both corpora were similar in collocational coverage, they shared only a small number of collocations with the spoken section of the British National Corpus (BNC). It is assumed this is due to time and spatial constraints, the relatively small range of collocations at their disposal, and the nature of subtitles, as the subtitle translators need to comply with the norms and rules of audiovisual subtitled translation.

Key Words: translation;corpus;collocations;Collogram;n-gram;movies;subtitles