Japanese and other Asian TV producers have been deploying multi-colored, and highly
visible, intra-lingual captions on TV programs to enhance their appeal and to influence
their viewers’ interpretations. The practice of adding these captions is far from
innocent and is prone to abuse and overuse due to the lack of official guidelines and
an evidence base. We conducted a multimodal analysis within the framework of
relevance theory to provide an empirically supported insight into the way in which
these captions, known as “telop” in Japan, form part of a production’s deliberate and
careful media design. Our findings suggest that telop are deployed in conjunction with
other communicative resources that are deliberately used to influence viewers’
interpretations, to enhance and make affective values in TV programs more explicit.
The increasing use of diegetically integrated captions elsewhere further justifies the
need for critical TV and new media research on telop.
Item Type:
Article (Published)
Refereed:
Yes
Uncontrolled Keywords:
telop; impact captions; multimodal analysis; media design; relevance theory; cognitive and affective mutuality; audiovisual translation; impressions; affect