Agapé: Moral Attitudes through the Prism of the Movie Subtitles

Abstract

We deal with the terms subtitling, guilt and innocence. Moreover, we describe the influence that the translator of the subtitles can have on our/spectator’s opinion about moral attitudes in film. In this article we do not describe the visual part of the film or the sound, we focus our attention only on the text (oral or written). We demonstrate it by comparing two sets of Czech subtitles of the Croatian movie Agape (2017, Schmidt). The first set was made with an intermediator (via English subtitles), while the second one was made without it. We point out that the language based misunderstanding can cause a misleading perception of the original message of the movie, and in the described case it can influence our perception of guilt or innocence of the main character.