Nonverbal Cues

The interpretation of nonverbal cues in film and animation is a very important part of understanding the content one is taking in. The skills to interpret these cues develop early in our lives. According to a study done by Robert J. Custini and Robert S. Feldman on children's social compitence, "... the ability to recognize (decode) and produce (encode) nonverbal cues relating to a person's internal affective state are skills that are fairly well established even at an early age." (1, pg 336)

Within animation, those nonverbal cues are often key to understanding what is happening within the story; however, according to Colm Caffery, nonverbal cues within foreign films and animations may be misinterpreted or the subtitle may portray something different from what the actual script says. (2) Most of the time this is done to make the film or animation more culturally relevant, or to make the translation more understandable for the culture that it is being brought into.

When crossing cultures, sometimes the nonverbal cues within a film or animation may be lost or misunderstood. Caffery explains that in foreign animations, "... if the subtitler does not explain [the nonverbal cue] in any way, the viewer will have to use other semiotic channels to create an interpretative frame of their own." (2, pg 167) Within the study Caffery did on viewer perception of a subtitled animation, he also noted that the viewers relied on the subtitles when they were on screen, often completely missing the nonverbal cue within the animation. (2)

---------------------------------------------------------
1. Custini, Robert; Feldman, Pobert. "Children's Social Compitence and Nonverbal Encoding and Decoding of Emotions." Journal of Clinical Child Psychology 18.4 (1989): 336-342. Print.
2. Caffrey, Colm. “Viewer perception of visual nonverbal cues in subtitled TV Anime.” European Journal of English Studies 12.2 (2008): 163-178. Print.