such as novels or biographies, because these sources are exclusively verbal. Yet, cinema adaptations like The Lord of the Rings or the Harry Potter saga, in which visual effects are exploited to a great extent, seem to put this idea into question.
In fact, some in the industry perceive the visual dimension as the most important in audiovisual productions. DiMaggio (1990: 11) argues that ‘[t];o write for television, you must think in pictures’, because television is a ‘visual art form’; a view shared by Díaz-Cintas (2008a: 3):
although, a priori, all dimensions could be thought to be equally important in terms of communication, the reality is that the visual-nonverbal, i.e. the image, seems to carry more weight than the word, at least in the production of most of the big blockbuster films touring the world […] Not surprisingly, we speak about the ‘viewer’ rather than the ‘reader’ or ‘hearer’ of films or other audiovisual programmes.
Images have been said to prevail over verbal language even in cases in which the audiovisual product derives from literary material, like Dexter (§4.3.1). In the case of this series, its creator, James Manos Jr (in Nickell 2008: online), sees verbal language as complementary: ‘My job as a screenwriter is to create emotions, feelings all through images, and any language used, is meant to complement that’. His view that language is (just) a tool whereby screenwriters build up a more complex story is shared by novelist John Irving (in Toscan 2012: 381) when he had to adapt his own novel The Cider House Rules for the large screen in 1999:
There is no (literary) language in a screenplay. (For me, dialogue doesn’t count as language.) What passes for language in a screenplay is rudimentary, like the directions for assembling a complicated children’s toy. The only aesthetic is to be clear … A screenplay, as a piece of writing, is merely the scaffolding for a building someone else is going to build … However many months I spend writing a screenplay, I never feel as if I’ve been writing at all. I’ve been constructing a story.
←24 | 25→
The important role of verbal language in story and character construction has been underlined by authors like Díaz-Cintas and Remael (2007: 49), who attribute three functions to film dialogue: ‘structuring, narrative-informative, and an interactional one’. Bednarek (2012: 122) points out that ‘dialogue conveys the emotional state of the speaker’ and even though it is not the only means, it is the most important to construct the character’s identity in audiovisual productions. For her part, Forchini (2012: 35) emphasises the crucial role of linguistic choice in films and TV productions to ‘relate enthralling stories, and to prevent the audience from losing track of the plot, which compromises the spontaneity of language’.
Probably because of the importance of language in story construction, numerous specialised courses and handbooks are available for people interested in improving their writing skills, containing tips and specific suggestions with regard to the verbal disposition of dialogue. Section 3.4.2 elaborates on this type of suggestions made by writers, with emphasis placed on the pursuit of dialogic naturalness, a widely shared goal in both screenwriting and subtitling.
3.3. Linguistic features of subtitling
The literature has emphasised the idea that there is a way of writing that is prototypical of translated texts. In order to characterise this type of language, experts of translation into the English language have compiled the Translational English Corpus in an attempt to detect traces of this style or way of writing that some call translationese (Tirkkonen-Condit 2003; Baroni and Bernardini 2006). Similar assumptions have been made about the resulting textual product of audiovisual translations. In this respect, Chaume (2004b: 854) talks of a ‘macrogenre of translations’, and opines that: ‘Within the macrogenre of Translations (with capital letters), audiovisual translations have already become a genre with specific characteristics, easily recognised by their addressees’. ←25 | 26→For the specific case of subtitling, Díaz-Cintas (2003: 280–281) proposes the term subtitlese to name what he more generally calls ‘subtitle discourse’.
The following section summarises the main ideas put forward in the literature about the key linguistic features of subtitling.
3.3.1. The hybrid nature of subtitling
Subtitling can be classified in accordance with a number of criteria, such as the following:
a) its intended target (general audiences, deaf and hard-of-hearing, language learners, children, etc.);
b) its author (professionals, fansubbers, activists);
c) the languages involved in the process (intralingual, interlingual);
d) the tools employed (software- or web-based subtitling);
e) the exhibition medium (TV, VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, cinema, stage, internet);
f) the type of information conveyed (dialogue, onscreen written information);
g) their technical presentation (open or closed).
Karamitroglou (2000: 5) builds on several previous accounts of interlingual subtitling and proposes this synthetic definition:
The translation of the spoken (or written) source text of an audiovisual product into a written target text which is added onto the images of the original product, usually at the bottom of the screen.
His definition addresses three key aspects of subtitling: (a) code shift from one language into another (translation); (b) medium change from spoken to written; and (c) their prototypical position at the bottom of the screen. Luyken et al.’s (1991: 31) previous definition already included these three basic ideas, but additionally emphasised the ephemeral nature ←26 | 27→of subtitles on screen as well as the ubiquitous condensation involved in subtitling.
From the temporal and spatial perspectives, a subtitle should be on screen for a minimum of 1 second and a maximum of 6 (or 7) seconds, contain two lines at most, and each line should consist of a maximum of 37 to 42 characters, including spaces. Because of these technical constraints, subtitles show traces of translated, summarised and transcribed texts, as shown in Figure 1.
This tripartite conception of subtitles means that they are governed by norms at different levels. The idea that multiple factors influence the final design of subtitles is thoroughly developed in Karamitroglou (2000). Mattsson (2006)
