field, neutralisation was first contemplated in prescriptivist contributions made about translation strategies or procedures (Vinay and Darbelnet 1958; Nida 1964; Newmark 1988; Chesterman 1997). Later contributions, such as Lomheim’s (1999: 204), define neutralisation by explaining what it is not: ‘the opposite of Neutralisation is to retain the style, colour and spice’. The phenomenon has been described as prototypical of subtitling in works by Zaro (2001), Gottlieb (2002) Díaz-Cintas (2003), Perego (2005), Nagel et al. (2009) and Bartoll (2012), and has also been attributed to translated texts in general (Stewart 2000). The practice is understood as a simplification of the lexicon and of the registers or language varieties present in the TT, in which there tends to be a preference ←30 | 31→for high frequency lexicon (Gottlieb 1997; Díaz-Cintas 2003; Nagel et al. 2009) that materialises in a rather aseptic register. Nagel et al. (2009) claim that specific register varieties come across as disturbing elements for the audience and, hence, the need to neutralise them. In a similar vein, Deckert (2013: 188), who investigates the English-Polish subtitles of four documentary films from the point of view of Cognitive Linguistics, reaches the conclusion that the language of subtitles is ‘better-conventionalised’ than the one of the STs. The notions of neutralisation and conventionalised language are revisited in Chapter 8, in which Hanks’s (2013a) approach to corpus analysis is proposed as a methodological framework for the study of the lexicon of subtitles.
Finally, it is worth noting that lexical features of subtitling are generally adapted to the audience’s expectations (Díaz-Cintas 2003) and decisions are made on a product-oriented basis, for example, different criteria are adopted for the translation of children cartoons or specialised documentaries. One of the aims of this book is to ascertain whether they apply to the subtitling of police procedurals.
3.4. Subtitling scripted dialogue: The challenge of fictive orality
The CoPP contains the transcripts of TV dialogue exchanges (ST) and the translated subtitles of such scripted TV dialogue (TT). Both the ST and the TT are the result of a complex creation process involving medium conversion, consisting of the main phases shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Main phases in the CoPP’s ST and TT creation process
The ST has been written by resorting to the device of fictive orality, while the TT presumably tries to preserve this feature of the ST. Thus, both the ST and the TT may be said to lie at an intermediate point along the orality-writenness continuum, as theorised by Koch and Oesterreicher (1985, 1990).
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3.4.1. The continuum between spoken and written language
According to Koch and Oesterreicher (1985, 1990), there are two types of language surging from the activation of a determinate medium (phonic, graphic) and conception (written, spoken), as shown in Table 3.
Table 3. Types of language according to Koch and Oesterreicher (1990)
| Medium | Conception | Type of language |
| Phonic | Spoken | Language of communicative immediacy |
| Graphic | Written | Language of distance |
This model of analysis has been reelaborated and updated by Brumme and Espunya (2012), who propose the following factors as decisive in the identification of genres along the continuum:
a) A cognitive factor, that is to say, spontaneity, as opposed to a high degree of reflection in written communication. There is normally some short-term planning and hardly any possibility to organise the spoken utterances.
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b) A psychological factor, as the speakers do not want to explicitly plan or organise their contributions. There is a high degree of familiarity or closeness between the participants in face-to-face interaction, whereas in the situation of distance, the speakers do not normally know each other.
c) A social factor, namely, the private setting of the communicative event versus the public or formal setting of distance communication.
d) Dialogical character of communication and a maximum of cooperation among the participants.
e) Emotional involvement and affective contribution of the participants.
f) Incidence of evaluative attitudes towards the partner and the referent.
g) Subjective positioning towards the utterance.
h) Referential immediacy or context embeddedness (as opposed to the contextual dissociation of distance). Speakers can refer to the here and now of the situation and interaction.
i) Physical proximity or face-to-face interaction of partners (in contrast to the distance in space and time).
j) Knowledge shared by the interacting participants.
In Koch and Oesterreicher’s (1990) account of language, TV dialogue would belong to the language of communicative immediacy, whereas subtitles would appertain to the language of distance, based on their spoken or written conception, respectively. Nonetheless, the understanding of this classification as a continuum is helpful to explain that (a) TV dialogue, albeit spoken, is planned (script) and is therefore bound to portray features of the language of distance; and (b) since subtitles strive to portray the spoken, phonic material delivered by actors on screen, they also hold features of the language of communicative immediacy.
By conceptualising spoken and written language as part of a continuum, Biber (1988: 199) undertakes the multidimensional analysis of a range of spoken and written genres in English and demonstrates that:
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