RICHARD CHAPMAN The Role of Subtitles in Language Teaching 1. Introduction Before embarking on a theoretical analysis of subtitling as a potential learning tool, it is well to attempt to clarify exactly what subtitles are from a learning perspective. We may consider subtitles a third channel of communication, in which the visual and the auditory are augmented by the textual 1 . The additive quality of subtitles from an in- formational point of view must be taken into consideration whenever we aim to eval- uate the teaching potentialities offered by captions. But there are other significant aspects of subtitles that we should be aware of when we consider using them in language teaching. They are obvious, and highly visible examples of overt translation (House 2009), which virtually pits the translator against the critic (and, of course, our students might quickly become informed critics of the quality of particular subtitles). Subtitling certainly presents translation choices in clear, bite-sized chunks for our evaluation. Pragmatically, subtitles are essentially adaptive, aiming at creating an equivalent dynamic effect rather than a literal one-for- one version of the original. This again might help students at various levels to consid- er the real (and often thorny) decisions translators face. The particular constraints of subtitling may also be revealing, especially the need for concision and high coherence. Questions of formality and normalisation will also almost inevitably arise in the ob- servation of captions. While the fundamental issue (for subtitling) of synchronisation will seem of little immediate value to the ‘average language student’, the opportunity to concentrate on pronunciation (with intralingual captions) or contrastive analysis (with interlingual captions) could be exploited. The literature on the use of subtitles in various language-learning settings is gradu- ally becoming more substantial, even if empirical evidence for measurable benefits is inevitably scarce (it is notoriously difficult to ‘prove’ cognitive or educational gains, 1 The concept of third channel is seen from a teaching perspective; not, of course, from a semiotic one where we might consider captions to be a fifth channel, after the auditory non-verbal, auditory verbal, visual non-verbal and visual textual (e.g. signs and letters etc. in scenes). Here the semiotic analysis is perhaps of less use than the simpler pedagogic view.