All Greek to me: The Power of Subtitles

by Olivia Caputo

I recently took a trip to Athens, Greece. It’s the first time in a long time that I’ve visited a place where I don’t have much grasp of the language (having only traveled to the US, UK, Spain, and France since 2020). Not only do I not speak Greek, but I can’t even read their alphabet. I learned how to say “hello,” “please,” and “thank you” and to smile apologetically when I switched to English.

Luckily for me, there were English translations everywhere I looked–from museum plaques to menu items–allowing me to enjoy my time there even with my limited vocabulary. Even so, what stood out most was a translation in the other direction.
I proposed one night that we see a movie at an outdoor cinema. They were showing 10:30 PM: Summer, an English-language film by an American expat director, Jules Dassin, with subtitles in Greek. The story, based on a French novel by Marguerite Duras, stars Melina Mercouri, who would go on to become Greece’s first female Minister of Culture and Sports. While not a film I would necessarily have chosen in other circumstances, it was impressively international. Plus, I was in it for the experience of going to a rooftop cinema with a view of the Acropolis. Because this was an American film set in Spain, the audio was almost entirely in my two working languages, though the Greek subtitles were… well, they were all Greek to me.

All of this brought to mind the concept of the gossiping effect, first introduced in a 1995 work by Egil Törnqvist. (I know we were all thinking it, right?) In essence, when an audience watches something with subtitles, they have the source audio and target text simultaneously available (unlike a translated novel where you only see the translation). As such, the audience will automatically compare the two versions. In audiovisual translation theory, this is called the gossiping effect.

There are various ways it can kick in. If you have a sense of the original language, you may be comparing the wording to test your knowledge. For example, a Spanish learner might wonder why “te invito” has been translated as “my treat.” And even if a viewer doesn’t speak the source language, they might notice that a sentence that took seven words to say in French needed only three in English.

Of course, the assumption here is that you’re relying on the subtitles (or can at least understand them). Obviously, this was not the case for my movie night in Athens. Still, this did not stop me from experiencing the gossiping effect. For example, my travel companions and I had seen a sign earlier that day that got us wondering whether the Greek symbol for a question mark was a semicolon. So when a character asked a question and the subtitle ended with a semicolon, it helped confirm it. And while I couldn’t read the letters themselves, I found myself glancing down to see whether the subtitles were favoring the industry-standard bottom-heavy-pyramid structure and how they broke up sentences and events. I even started to recognize words like “yes” and “no.”

But mostly, it made me appreciate what subtitles can do, which is allow me and my friends, who don’t really speak any modern Greek, and an audience of Athenians to sit down together as the sun sets behind the Acropolis and watch a film, all taking our understandings from different elements and sharing a common experience in our separate tongues. So often, the gossiping effect is used to complain about a translation that didn’t quite capture the meaning, but I’d rather see it as a reminder of how amazing it is that, despite all the different languages that exist in the world–from French to English, Spanish to Greek, and many more–there are people working to make art accessible to as many people as possible, one subtitle at a time.

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