earticle

영어

This study aims to compare the quantity reduction aspects of lectures between fansubs (subtitles available on the TED website, hereinafter to be referred to “TED”) and subtitles by experts (subtitles on the EBS website or “EBS”). Six pairs of TED Talk subtitles in the Korean language were identified. The number of words and sentences, the number of clauses in each sentence, omissions of conjunctions, pronouns, and discourse markers as well as condensations were analyzed, and the statistical significance was verified. The findings are as follows: Overall, EBS was more aggressive in quantity reduction than TED, and the difference showed statistical significance. In comparison to movie and documentary subtitles, which showed a decrease in the number of sentences, both TED and EBS showed increases in the number of sentences. However, the number of words decreased by 29.5% for TED and 51.0% for EBS respectively, which is in line with the findings on movie subtitles by professionals. The average number of words per sentence was higher for TED at 9.3 than EBS at 7.2, indicating that EBS maintains relatively simpler sentence structures. TED was found to depend more on sentence separation, and EBS more frequently used a sentence integration strategy. Omissions of clauses, conjunctions, pronouns, discourse markers, and condensations were witnessed in both TED and EBS with significant differences in frequencies and the omission patterns between the two entities. TED was much more hesitant to omit meaningful parts than EBS. In contrast, TED and EBS alike were conservative in omitting conjunctions, which indicates that both entities consider logical flow important. Both TED and EBS showed high reduction rates in pronouns and discourse markers, which were above those of their word reduction respectively.