Spoken theatre surtitling: the specificities of the genre and the current practice in the Czech Republic

This thesis examines spoken theatre surtitling as a specific and still relatively under- systematised area of audiovisual translation. The theoretical part situates drama surtitling within a broader translation studies context and discusses its position at the intersection of audiovisual translation and interpreting. Attention is also paid to current surtitling practices, primarily on the Czech theatre scene, as well as to the differences between drama and opera surtitling. The empirical part of the thesis is based on a qualitative analysis of the English surtitles for the production called Návrat krále (The Return of the King), staged at the Švanda Theatre in Prague. The analysis is focused on the quantitative extent of the surtitles compared to the original text, the preservation of the semantic and stylistic core of the source text, the translation of song passages, and the transfer of culture-specific temporal and local references. In this section, the empirical findings are interpreted primarily through Anton Popovič's theory of translation shifts and Jiří Levý's concept of variable and invariable elements of a text structure. In the discussion section, the results of the analysis are further interpreted using Andrew Chesterman's theory of translation norms, which makes it possible to reflect...