Shinohara, Yuko (篠原有子) (2018): 映画字幕の翻訳学－日本映画と英語字幕 (Eigajimaku no hon’yakugaku: nihon’eiga to eigojimaku) [The translation studies of film subtitling: Japanese films and English subtitles]. Kyoto: Koyo Shobo (晃洋書房), 240 p.

Since the book under scrutiny is written in Japanese and emerges from Japan, a longer-than-usual preamble is warranted. The title of the work can be translated quite literally as “The Translation Studies of Film Subtitling: Japanese Films and English Subtitles,” but this rather vague label does not really do the book justice. This monograph is, in fact, the published version of Yuko Shinohara’s (2017a) doctoral thesis, which bears the much more apposite alternative English title Standardization of English Subtitles for Japanese Films: A Study Focusing on the Production Process (see Shinohara 2017b for a summary in Japanese). Shinohara has been working as a subtitler since the latter half of the 1980s and thus possesses over three decades of experience in the trade. In 2011, she obtained a Master’s degree with a sociologically oriented dissertation focusing on the many agents and norms involved in the production process of film subtitles in Japanese (Shinohara 2011). Since then, she has published several papers on topics such as the expectations of Japanese filmgoers regarding subtitles (Shinohara 2012), the strategies used to render into English subtitles the cultural references found in a specific Japanese film (Shinohara 2013), and the factors influencing the English subtitling of Japanese films (Shinohara 2014). In the late 1980s, in an article surveying the texts on translation published in Japan, Daniel Gile (1988: 115) stated that while “Japanese publications on translation are markedly more numerous than Western publications,” they “are aimed at the general public rather than at professionals or academics, and few are truly scientific or academic.” Nowadays, as was the case at the turn of the 1990s, there is certainly no shortage of books and magazines dealing with translation on the shelves of Japanese bookshops. Similarly, despite the significant growth and evolution of translation research in Japan over the last few decades, several of the newer publications remain personal essays or how-to manuals that cannot be considered scientific works. As Shinohara herself acknowledges in her monograph, the same holds true for books on audiovisual translation (henceforth AVT). This is precisely where Shinohara’s publication stands out: as rightly touted on its “obi” (a strip of paper looped around a book to pique shoppers’ interest), it is indeed “the first Japanese scholarly book to discuss film subtitling” (my translation). However, this does not mean that Japanese TS researchers are not interested in AVT, quite the contrary. In fact, a cursory look at the archives of Japan’s two main TS journals (i.e. Interpreting and Translation Studies and Invitation to Interpreting and Translation Studies) reveals that as many as around thirty papers are concerned with the theme. In the book’s short preface, the author first sets the scene by stressing the pivotal role English subtitles play in exporting Japanese films worldwide, especially through film festivals and markets. Shinohara then argues that in audiovisual translation studies (henceforth AVTS), little research has hitherto tackled English subtitles and the subtitling process in the broad, sociological sense. The aim of the book, the author declares, is first to identify the factors that influence the English subtitling of Japanese films, and then to examine what characteristics these factors bring about in the subtitles. The first chapter, which essentially consists of a literature review, begins broad in scope with a general introduction to AVT(S), before zeroing in on relevant approaches and prior research. The author also goes over a few handpicked AVT studies conducted in the Japanese context and ends the chapter with the claim that the subtitling process and its various agents, along with the “sociocultural approaches,” have yet to receive the attention they deserve. In Chapter …