Can language technology respond to the subtitler's dilemma? - a preliminary study

1. Background This study was prompted by three independent developments. One is a widely publicized criticism of the Japanese subtitles of the film The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring the first episode in the J.R.R.Tolkien trilogy. Shortly after the film's release in Japan in March 2002, complaints about the quality of the subtitles from Japanese fans led to petitions to the film's Japanese distributor and the director, Peter Jackson (O'Hagan, 2003a). The fans claimed that the Japanese translation reflected the subtitler's lack of appreciation of the world of the Lord of the Rings (LOTR) as created by Tolkien. It was subsequently revealed that the entire subtitling task had been completed in just one week by a single subtitler who had never read the book. This highlighted the fact that in the film industry subtitlers are often at the mercy of the market-driven approach becoming prevalent in the entertainment industry as a whole. For example, even the translation of the title of the film is not determined by the