Orthotypographical

If the early scholar-printers speak with an authoritative voice to their own profession in matters orthotypographical, progress in spelling reform was largely, the a. thinks, a matter of collaboration between literary authors and intelligent and progressive printers.

We describe an activity in which the second year students of our Faculty of Translation and Interpreting in Granada designed their own bilingual corpus of newspaper texts of 12,000 words and analyzed it in order to identify orthotypographical conventions, cultural references and the strategies used in the translation of cultural references.

Attention to orthotypographical rules is generrally underestimated in literary translations, despite its main importance.

One seminal article from the 1980s is Marleau’s ‘Le sous-titres ... un mal nécessaire’, from 1982, in which the author classifies the different challenges posed by subtitling in four categories: technological, psychological, artistic-aesthetic and linguistic. He offers some orthotypographical recommendations on the presentation of the subtitles and transcends the linguistic dimension of the practice, considering economic factors, the influence of the film industry and the input of different professionals that take part in the subtitling process.

The first article deals with the many tests taken on board to check the functionality and validity of a set of technical, orthotypographical and linguistic criteria designed to elaborate quality subtitles for deaf and hard of hearing adults in Spain.

In “Criteria for elaborating subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing adults in Spain: Description of a case study” (pp. 87-102), Ana Pereira uses a selection of technical and orthotypographical criteria for the subtitles in her experiment.

Paralinguistic codes. Chaume (2004a: 17) refers to those dubbing translators who also synchronize the dialogue, and indicates that they “should be familiar with a series of symbols that [...] represent certain suprasegmental features”, such as laughter, paralinguistic signs (i.e. differentiators, alternants, etc.) and silences and pauses. He also mentions that, in subtitling, “certain orthotypographical uses also exist, such as dots or suspension points, subtitle cuts, the use of capital letters, etc., which also represent paralinguistic signs (silences, pauses, and volume of the voice, respectively)”.

The period between the publication of Champ fleury in 1529 and Tory’s death in 1533 saw several landmark publications that put his proposed orthotypographical reforms into practice, most notably his edition of Clément Marot’s Adolescence Clémentine, which featured the first systematic use of the cedilla (ç), the acute accent over the e (é), and the apostrophe to mark elision.