The main purpose of this paper is to highlight the specific requirements of subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing, with particular attention being paid to young audiences. Deaf children constitute a very heterogeneous group – including different age groups, degrees of loss of hearing, methods of communication, educational and parental backgrounds – but some common needs can nevertheless be identified. This paper aims to discuss deaf children’s needs by taking into account the predominant method of communication used and how relevant this is from a subtitling perspective.
Considering that deaf children who are exposed to subtitles are in the process of acquiring and developing their knowledge of English, the linguistic difficulties encountered as well as their reading abilities will be discussed. Subtitles are mainly a tool for deaf children to access the audiovisual programme. However, research conducted with hearing children within a second language acquisition context (Koolstra et al. 1997, Neuman & Koskinen 1992) has shown that subtitles also benefit the learning and expansion of new vocabulary. This paper considers how relevant these findings are from our perspective and to which extent that they can be applied to deaf children. While it is not assumed that subtitles have a didactic function, the focus is on incidental learning and how this can be exploited through the production of subtitles.
Bearing in mind the needs of our audience, the educational potential of subtitles and the entertaining nature of audiovisual programmes for children, some observations on the subtitling practice are put forward for discussion and future research.

Solédad ZÁRATE completed her master’s degree in Audiovisual Translation (Roehampton University, UK) and wrote a thesis on Subtitling for Deaf Children on British Television. She has contributed articles to The NDCS Magazine and The Sign Language Translator and Interpreter journal and in 2007 she gave a paper at the 2nd International Conference “Media For All” (Leiria, Portugal), which was subsequently selected for publication. In April 2008, she started her doctoral research on Subtitling for Deaf Children at Imperial College, with a particular interest in the incidental learning that takes place in the process of reading subtitles. Since then, she has presented her work at international conferences in Montpellier (June 2008) and Berlin (October 2008).