Subtitling for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Iran: Textual Procedures in Intralingual Persian Subtitles

Since the 1970s, some countries have provided the deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) viewers with the accessibility service of subtitling for the d/Deaf and hard of hearing (SDH) to follow the law of equal rights. Screening of films with subtitles for DHH viewers in cinemas has been one of the media accessibility services in Iran. Due to the growing importance of media accessibility, audiovisual translation researchers have examined the effectiveness of conventional SDH procedures in recent years to bring this service closer to the needs and expectations of DHH. Following this approach, this study aims to analyze the textual procedures adopted in intralingual Persian SDH to see if they comply with the standards derived from other SDH studies. To this end, it firstly discusses the language skill of DHH to explain why textual procedures have been recurrent themes in SDH research, and then goes through the textual procedures suggested by SDH scholars as ways of facilitating reading process. Finally, it compares an intralingual Persian SDH with the original dialogue list in order to elicit the used textual procedures. The analysis indicates that the subtitle provider has completely edited and, as a result adapted the dialogue list in order to resolve any reading difficulty for the intended viewers. Reformulation and simplification rather than deletion have been the most recurrent textual procedures applied for editing out the dialogue list. In addition, the analysis reveals that non-metaphorical usage of language, explicitation, deletion of redundant spoken language phrases, definition of difficult words and expressions in parentheses, use of conventional thematic structures,segmentation of long sentences, use of a proper name rather than a personal pronoun, and deletion of cohesive elements could be named as the applied textual procedures. Taking into account the results obtained from the previous SDH studies, this study concludes that the applied textual procedures mostly fail to comply with the fundamental principles of editing intralingual SDH and, as a result are unlikely to meet the preferences of the intended viewers.