Use of Subtitles for Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian

[Ellen Elias-Bursac]

The Hague has made it a question of policy not to distinguish among B, C
and S. The interpreters in the booth are not chosen to match the
defendants' or witnesses' usage. They use something like a mid-Atlantic
English, avoiding localisms and marked distinguishing features, not so
much as a matter of policy as simply a personal socio-linguistic
adjustment. It often happens that a Croatian-speaking interpreter is
interpreting for a Serbian-speaking speaker and vice versa.  I can't
address the question you raised about subtitling in BH, Croatia and Serbia
because I'm not living there right now. I do know there were Serbian films
shown in Croatia with subtitles some years ago now and that this was a
subject of considerable amusement. I don't know whether a new film being
shown in Croatia from Serbia would also be subtitled, and I have no idea
what the approach would be in Serbia for a Croatian film. My guess is that
BH is so intersected by the various cultures that they assume mastery of
B, C and S by all their viewers on television. I do remember back in the
early 1980s when the Croatian drama series "Gruntovcani" in Kajkavian
dialect was shown throughout the then Yugoslavia there were calls for
subtitles because the dialect was so opaque to speakers in BH and Serbia.
But that is something entirely different!

On Sun, 27 Mar 2005, Loren A. Billings wrote:

> A colleague visited the war-crimes tribunal in the Hague and even listened
> to the headphone with simultaneous interpretation. There were, apparently,
> settings for S, C, and B. All three had the same person's voice!
>
> Loren A. Billings, Ph.D.
> Associate professor of linguistics
> Department of Foreign Languages and Literature
> National Chi Nan University
> Puli, Nantou County 545 Taiwan
>
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