TV or not TV? The impact of subtitling on English skills

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2018.12.019Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We provide a fundamental and novel explanation of the quality of English spoken worldwide–the translation mode of foreign movies and shows in television.

  • We identify a large positive effect for subtitled original version broadcasts, as opposed to dubbed television, on English proficiency scores.

  • We analyze the historical circumstances under which countries opted for one of the translation modes and use it to account for the possible endogeneity of the subtitling indicator.

  • We disaggregate the results by type of skills - listening comprehension, speaking, reading and writing - and find that television is an especially beneficial tool for listening comprehension.

  • Our paper suggests that governments could promote subtitling as a means to improve foreign language proficiency which, in turn, enhances economic performance.

Abstract

We study the influence of television translation techniques on the worldwide distribution of English-speaking skills. We identify a large positive effect for subtitled original version broadcasts, as opposed to dubbed television, on English proficiency scores. We analyze the historical circumstances under which countries opted for one of the translation modes and use it to account for the possible endogeneity of the subtitling indicator. We disaggregate the results by type of skills and find that television works especially well for listening comprehension. Our paper suggests that governments could promote subtitling as a means to improve foreign language proficiency.

Introduction

English is the language of the globalized world, and the lingua franca for the international communities in, among others, science, business, finance, advertising, tourism, and technology. Sixty-eight percent of citizens in the EU rate English as the most useful foreign language – far above the second position of French with 25% (European Commission, 2006).

Not surprisingly, English is the most widely learned foreign language, and this trend is expected to continue growing fast in the coming decades (Graddol, 2006). Graddol (1997) estimates that about one billion people are currently learning English worldwide, with 200 million in China alone.1 More than 80% of the EU’s school students learn English. The duration of foreign language as a compulsory subject ranges between six and 13 years in the non-English-speaking EU (Eurydice, 2005).2 In comparison, students in England and Wales have foreign languages for five and three years, respectively, and there are no requirements in Ireland and Scotland.3

Despite the huge amounts of time and money spent, disparities in English proficiency across non-English speaking countries are large. In places such as the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden, more than 80% of citizens state that they are able to hold a conversation in English, but the proportion is below 60% in some of their neighboring countries like Austria, Germany, and France (European Commission, 2006). Portuguese-takers of the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) score 95 on average (placing them 10th in a ranking of 135 countries), compared to 89 by their Spanish counterparts (rank 28). The reasons for these disparities between seemingly similar countries do not seem straightforward.

In this paper, we argue that the method used to translate foreign films and programs on television is an important driver of English skills in non-English-speaking countries. Subtitled original version programs provide continuous exposure to foreign languages as spoken by natives, which, we argue, is bound to improve the listeners’ foreign-language skills. The US produces most of the successful films (and series) worldwide,4 so that when someone watches films or series on television, the source language is very likely to be English.5 Thus, the citizens of countries where television is broadcast in the original version would have better English vocabulary, grammar and, in particular, listening comprehension, than those of countries where programs are dubbed. Surprisingly, only 12% of Europeans think that television is useful for learning foreign languages (European Commission, 2006).6

We show that the average English proficiency of a country is positively associated with the country’s expenditures in the education system and with the linguistic proximity of the local language to English. But, one of the most important significant explanatory factors appears to be the television translation mode. Our results suggest that, ceteris paribus, English skills are better in countries where television films and programs are subtitled. The magnitude of our effect is large, equivalent to 16.9% (one and a half standard deviations) of the average level of English skills. We disaggregate the results by types of skills – listening comprehension, speaking, reading, and writing – and find that television is an especially beneficial tool for listening comprehension.7

We use the insights of the history of cinema literature to account for the possible endogeneity of the translation mode, instrumenting it with language size at the time of the choice of translation mode. Indeed, we identify and analyze the historical circumstances under which countries opted for one of the alternatives in the years around World War II. According to the standard historical account, the use of subtitles was not due to a higher ability to understand the English language, nor to the idea that it would be beneficial for people to hear actors speak foreign languages (Crystal, 1997). Rather, limited box office receipts and a significant number of imported films induced small countries or, more precisely, countries with “small languages,” to favor the low-cost subtitling option. Second, authoritarian regimes would have promoted dubbing in the local language to strengthen national identity. In any case, national media markets coordinated around one of the translation technologies at that time (Gottlieb, 1997), and have not deviated since. Using historical data, we provide evidence that, indeed, subtitling tended to be adopted in countries whose national languages were less widely used internationally. But, in our estimations, dictatorial regimes did not adopt dubbing significantly more often than more democratic countries.

Our paper suggests that governments could promote subtitling as a means to improve English language proficiency. This can come in addition to recent policy efforts to promote foreign language education at school.8 The widespread knowledge of foreign languages, particularly English, has been linked to improvements in trade (Fidrmuc, Fidrmuc, 2009, Ku, Zussman, 2010, Melitz, Toubal, 2014), migration flows (Aparicio-Fenoll and Kuehn, 2016) and, more generally, income per capita (Ufier, 2015).9,10 Of course, proficiency in foreign languages also has a direct impact on business. A survey conducted by the European Commission among nearly 2000 small and medium European enterprises (European Commission, 2007) reports that a significant amount of business is being lost as a result of a lack of language skills.

As illustrations of our mechanism, consider again the cases of Austria and the Netherlands and Spain and Portugal. Austria and the Netherlands are two relatively small countries (less than 20 million inhabitants) that have similar levels of public education expenditure per student (3.08 and 3.07 percentage points of GDP per capita, respectively). But Austria shares a common language with Germany whereas Dutch is only spoken in the Netherlands and part of Belgium. Probably because of this, Austria broadcasts television dubbed in German while the Netherlands uses subtitles. This may contribute to explaining why 87% of the Dutch are able to hold a conversation in English while only 53% of Austrians can do so (European Commission, 2006). Similarly, Spain and Portugal share many geographical and cultural traits. But the number of Spanish speakers is double that of Portuguese speakers. Again, maybe in part because of this, Portugal uses subtitling while in Spain television is dubbed. And, as a result, Portugal’s results in the TOEFL exams are much better than Spain’s. Better English skills may serve to increase the trade flows of the Netherlands and Portugal.

This paper also suggests that the translation mode could be used as an additional instrument for English proficiency. Linguistic proximity has been traditionally used in the literature as a determinant of English proficiency (e.g., Ku, Zussman, 2010, Ufier, 2015). Of course, the validity of each of these two variables as an instrument depends on the variable of interest. But, if we want to study the impact of English proficiency on macroeconomic variables such as trade or migration, linguistic distance may not satisfy the exclusion restriction because it may be capturing cultural similarities (Chen, 2013, Santacreu-Vasut, Shoham, Gay, 2013) that may have a direct influence on trade and migration. In contrast, the choice of television translation mode does not depend on any kind of similarity between English and non-English speaking countries and in that sense it may be more likely to fulfill the exclusion restriction.

Nevertheless, the use of television translation mode as an instrument is not without drawbacks, either. First, it can only be used for trade with or migration to English-speaking countries. This may not be especially problematic, as most academic papers and databases focus on the US. Second, and more importantly, the main television translation mode has very little variation, none over time and very little within countries that share the same language. So, it cannot be used in regressions that include country or language fixed effects. More generally, our study inevitably needs to rely on a relatively small sample that mainly uses cross-section, between-language variation in translation mode to make inference.

The rest of the paper proceeds as follows. In the next section we provide an overview of the translation modes and a brief history of the choice between dubbing and subtitling. The data is introduced in Section 3. Section 4 provides a description of the empirical strategy. In Section 5 we present our main results on the influence of the translation mode on English skills, as well as those on why there are subtitles in some countries and dubbing in others. In Section 6 we conclude and discuss the limitations of our data and approach.

Section snippets

Television translation modes: background and history

There are three main foreign language translation traditions: subtitling, dubbing, and voice-over. Subtitling consists of supplying a translation of the spoken source language dialogue into the target language in the form of synchronized captions, usually at the bottom of the screen, while the sound is in the original version. Hence, we use the terms “subtitled” and “original version” interchangeably. Dubbing is the method by which the foreign dialogue is translated, adjusting to the mouth

Data

We use data combining measures of English skills, translation mode, and demographic and educational variables for the period 2008–2015, as well as historical data of the time of sound cinema diffusion. Our data set includes all the 135 countries worldwide for which: (i) there is information on our measure of English proficiency, the internet TOEFL score, plus the television translation mode, and (ii) English is not the official language. Table A.1 in the Appendix shows the country list used in

The empirical strategy

In our main analysis, we estimate the effect of subtitling on English proficiency using the following linear specification based on time-average data:log(TOEFLi)=β0+β1Si+β2Lansizei+β3Popi+β4log(Edexi)+β5Linsimi+Ci+εiwhere TOEFLi represents the average English proficiency in country i over the 2008–2015 period, as measured by one of the TOEFL scores (paper or internet-based, overall or disaggregated by skill), Si is a dummy variable equal to one if country i uses subtitles, Lansizei represents

The determinants of english proficiency (OLS)

Table 3 reports the results of OLS regressions on several factors that could plausibly influence the level of English proficiency in a country, as specified in Eq. (1). The dependent variable is the overall internet-based TOEFL score in each country. We control for language size, population size, education expenditures and linguistic proximity. We depart from a specification with neither the education and colonial past controls nor language fixed effects. We then sequentially add the education

Conclusion and discussion

The general message in this paper is simple. Continuous exposure to English-language media contents help people learn English and, thus, the citizens of countries where foreign films and programs are shown in their original version in television will likely speak, on average, better English than those that live in countries where television is dubbed. This is relevant because previous studies have shown that better English language skills improve economic performance.

Dubbing countries in our

Acknowledgments

We thank Antonio Cabrales, Jan Fidrmuc, Sven-Olof Fridolfsson, Karsten Jonsen, Javier Ortega, Thomas Tangerås, an associate editor, two reviewers, and seminar participants at City University, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Institute for Research in Industrial Economics, Universitat de Barcelona, the European Economic Association, and the Work Pensions and Labour Economics Conferences for helpful feedback. Eduard Bartoll, Natàlia Izard, Agnieszka Szarkowska and Patrick Zabalbeascoa helped with the

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  • Augusto passed away in December 2012. He was a talented, brave, and enthusiastic friend. We miss him dearly. This paper is the result of one of his many amazing ideas, and it is therefore a tribute to him.

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