A Pathology of Orthography of Subtitles at IRINN News Network, and IFilm TV Network: a Corpus-Based Study

The present study tries to investigate the current orthographic system of formal subtitles of the IRINN (Islamic Republic of Iran News Network), and informal subtitles of IFilm TV Network from a corpus-based perspective; so that besides finding the dominant orthography of the subtitles, their spelling and technical errors can be compared and contrasted according to the orthography instruction approved by the Academy of Persian Language and Literature. To this end, a corpus of 1000 sentences was prepared from the IRINN subtitles and the messages from people subtitled at the IFilm from October 2014 to April 2015. Then, using computer-aided tools, the frequency of the words and expressions in the subtitles were extracted. study looks at common orthography in these subtitles while considering spelling and technical errors thereof on the basis of orthographic instructions adopted by Iran’s Academy of Persian Language and Literature. Cases of spelling/stylistic errors, errors of non-breaking-space removal, errors of space removal, errors of space insertion, and cursive and non-cursive writing were studied using the content analysis method. The study revealed the existence of various orthographic errors in both TV channels and indicated that errors in IFilm network’s subtitles are much frequent. The analysis of frequency of orthographic errors and their comparison at each TV channel showed that in most cases, there is a significant difference between these errors regarding their types and frequency.