The EURECAP project: watching films and series with same language subtitles

During Trinity Term at Oxford University, we are having a project on the value of same language subtitles for language learning, the EURECAP Project and it is focusing on French, German, Italian  and Spanish. Dr Vanderplank, the director, will write an article on the subject.

What he is trying to find out:

"Research on English language captions (widely available on TV programmes in the UK) has shown that they can be very helpful for non-native speaker of English in supporting viewing, in tuning in to fast speech and unfamiliar accents, and in improving vocabulary knowledge.  We now want to extend this research to other languages".

In order to have a decent collection, I have ordered same language subtitle for the deaf and hearing impaired from local Amazon websites, Amazon France, Amazon Spain etc..  France, Italy and Spain have offered a lot of material available, so I did manage to get a nice collection of French films with French subtitles, Italian films with Italian subtitles and same with Spanish.

I have to say I was very impressed with Spanish DVDs: not only do they offer subtitles for the hard of hearing, but they also offer audio commentaries of the film for people with visual disabilities.

For German DVDs however, it has been quite shocking to see the scarce avaibility of DVDs with same language subtitles.

I have nevertheless managed to find a substantial amount of German DVDs with German subtitles so that the project can start.

For the acquisition process I have used wikipedia (list of awards winner) and the Internet Movie Database (the best Spanish language films for example) and also a very helpful group on Facebook called Vidéothécaires! (DVD librarians in France who have been extremely helpful, especially for giving me titles of the latest French series) then, as previously said, I have ordered through the Amazon sites of each country.

For cataloguing, I have set the quality level quite high (highest at Oxford University for DVDs, level 7) and have taken great care (well hopefully!) in stating the languages spoken, "Spanish" for example, is not enough if it is a film coming from Argentina, so you have to add "Spanish (Argentina)" in your record. Also, I have added the beginning of the stories only so that people will not have what we call a "spoiler"!
There were issues with the film ratings as many of the films are not on the British Board of Film Classification. In these cases, I left the certificate (if any) provided by the country.

Students are being asked to watch at least a DVD per three day, though binge watching is allowed as well. They have to:

• Pass a language test and have an interview with the director
• Keep a diary, either printed or on-line (Martin our IT Officer has created a online diary and a discussion forum in our intranet) concentrating on:

1.  the quality of the subtitles (are they faithful? Are they differences between the sound and text?)
2.  the use they make of the subtitles (pause and replay for difficult passages or just watch the whole film?) with examples to be provided
3.  if the students feel more confident listening, and forget about the subtitles, if they are following the sound more than the text?
4. confidence level of being able to watch each film with or without subtitles on a scale of 1 to 10

The Eurecap project will last for about 5 weeks, after which some participants will be chosen for an interview with the director in order to discuss their experience.

I very much hope this project will push some countries to make more effort in producing commercial DVDs with same language subtitles. If Spain can do this (and brilliantly so, including hard of hearing and people with visual disabilities) surely Germany can do the same!

Not to mention, of course, the incredible help same language subtitles are for language learners!