Abstract

Movie subtitles need to be concise as they are flashed only for a brief period of time across the screen. In conversations seen in movie subtitles, the participants’ contributions are not equal in length, and some responses are brief. This paper explores 1) whether brief responses seen in conversations are omitted or retained in subtitles; and 2) what seems to be the determining factor for omitting brief responses. We argue that the omission or the retention of a brief response depends on whether or not the audience is able to see the direction the brief response is going to take without an explicit linguistic cue.