Los parámetros que identifican el subtitulado para sordos: análisis y clasificación

Subtitling for the Deaf and the Hard-of-Hearing (SDH) was long considered a “simple” variant of standard subtitling. Only recently, uprising social demands together with a growing presence of SDH materials in different international audiovisual environments, have promoted the proliferation of research initiatives on SDH practices. As a result, the systematic application to SDH of some of the parameters originally adopted for standard subtitling has proven to be controversial. This paper presents a proposal for the specific analysis of SDH parameters. Based on a taxonomy developed by Bartoll (2008), the new taxonomy describes the restricted application of standard parameters to this accessibility modality. The new proposal focuses on the parameters that are specific to SDH –the representation of extralinguistic information– and sheds light into the tight connection established among all the agents involved. The new taxonomy tries to provide researchers and SDH professionals with a tool to evaluate SDH practices and analyze the implications of potential modifications on parameters.