The audience must engage in "circular reading"—constantly moving between the visual action, the audio, and the text—which forces them to reconcile these two potentially conflicting streams of information.
Subtitles act as a filter. They are a "duplicitous" representation of the source culture, often simplifying complex idioms to make them digestible for a foreign audience, as discussed in works like Between the Lines . subtitle Duplicity
At its core, this term explores how a subtitle can be "duplicitous"—not necessarily out of malice, but because it often carries a separate, simultaneous meaning from the original spoken or written word. This occurs in two primary ways: subtitle Duplicity