Surtitling and the audience: A love-hate relationship

Abstract

This article aims to describe audience attitude towards spoken theatre surtitling. More specifically, it reports on an experiment carried out during a major Spanish theatre festival (Festival de Otoño en Primavera, Madrid, 2014), with the purpose of assessing audience reception of a surtitled production (Le voci di dentro byPiccolo Teatro di Milano) and their awareness of what they consider quality in surtitling, or what jeopardises it. After an overview of the theoretical framework about surtitling live performances, the paper focuses on the data and the results of the survey. The experiment data ranges from a general appreciation of the surtitled production to a more specific evaluation of its comprehension under varying factors. In total, results from over 70 reception tests are reported and discussed. Finally, promoting a more systematic use of reception studies in audiovisual translation research and, in particular, in a yet undefined practice like surtitling spoken theatre is also a key objective of this article.