The subtitles of the Modern Day : A brief comparative analysis of subtitles found in Finnish TikTok videos

Abstract

A day in this modern life often includes a great deal of social media. It is worthwhile to study further the quality of the content in said media. Therefore, this thesis consists of a case study of three TikTok videos found on the channels paidatonriehuja, yleuutiset and JoshofWestern. The three videos are from different genres: an advertisement, a news story and a humorous content video, but they have one thing in common which led them to this thesis. It is because they have subtitles. In the advertisement with Käärijä, a Finnish artist, there are interlingual subtitles in English. In the news story from Yle, a Finnish broadcasting company, there are intralingual subtitles in Finnish. In the third video, the humorous content video from an influencer called Josh, there are both types of subtitles as it has subtitles in Finnish and in English.

The study contains a comparative analysis on the subtitles found in the previous videos. This comparison was made with a qualitative approach by observing the similarities and differences within the subtitles against the recommendations which are found in previously published guidelines and books about subtitles such as Díaz-Cintas and Remael’s (2021) Subtitling: Concepts and Practises, Finnish Language Expert’s (2020 Subtitles Quality Recommendations, BBC’s Subtitle Guidelines (2024), and Ivarsson and Carrol’s (1999) Subtitling. The goal of the study was to give an overview on the social media subtitles found in these specific Finnish videos on TikTok and if they are done by upholding the guidelines. There is also a glance in the quality of the interlingual subtitles using Jan Pedersen’s (2017) FAR model.

The theoretical framework and the analysis in this thesis both follow the same categorisation that Díaz-Cintas and Remael (2021) introduced in their book where they divided subtitling in four key categories. Linguistic dimension focuses on the readability, grammar and idiomaticity of the subtitles in comparison to the language’s norms. The dimension also entails the discussion of the loyalty of the subtitles to their source text. Spatial dimension is about the proper placement and length of the subtitles in relation to the screen. The temporal discusses the recommendations for the duration of subtitles. This includes the appropriate duration of pauses and how the subtitles are synchronised with the speech. The final category is appearance, which focuses on the best fonts and colours to use for subtitles to make them visible but not too disturbing for the viewer.

The results indicate that the analysed subtitles mostly abide by the guidelines in their linguistic approach as they are following the target language’s grammar, they are idiomatic and most importantly, loyal to their target text. However, when analysing the interlingual subtitles with the FAR model (Pedersen, 2017), they had the most errors in readability. The subtitles deviated the most in spatial and temporal aspects against the recommendations. More extensive research with a multitude of videos would be needed for a more generalised study.