rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">1998)
As previously stated, these are features typically attributed to each medium of communication, that is, phonic or graphic. Whenever writers intentionally resort to the use of prototypical features of the spoken language when working on the graphic medium, the result is a text with traces of fictive orality, which is the case with scripted dialogue and subtitling.
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Goetsch (1985) was the first researcher to use the term fingierte Mündlichkeit [fictive orality]1 in his contributions. With this expression he was referring to linguistic manifestations of different nature, prototypically associated with spoken language, which could be found in literary texts. Before the coining of the term, the phenomenon had already been noted by other researchers, such as Tannen (1982: 14), who had defined creative writing as:
a genre which is necessarily written but which makes use of features associated with oral language because it depends for its effect on interpersonal involvement or the sense of identification between the writer or the characters and the reader.
Following Freunek (2007: 26), fictive orality, despite being closely linked to real everyday spoken language, should not be considered as a copy or perfect reproduction of the latter. Goetsch (1985) also shares this opinion when he claims that fictive orality responds to conscious writing strategies of specific authors. Thus, real practice must be taken as a reference by the literary or audiovisual creator. As explained by Sanger (1998: 48–49), ‘the convention is that, in even the most apparently realistic dialogue, most of the features of actual speech are tidied up’.
Brumme (2008) points out that the aim of fictive orality is to evoke realistic situations and authors use it as a device to provide their fictional characters, whether literary or audiovisual, with vivacity and plausibility. As stated by various authors, it contributes to the ‘illusion of verbal language’ (Nagel et al. 2009: 58), to an ‘illusion of authenticity’ (Brumme 2012: 13) or an ‘idealised colloquiality’ (Calsamiglia and Tusón 2007: 83, my translation). As Briz (2001: 20) points out, fictive orality frequently resorts to diatopic and diastratic marks in characters’ dialogue and takes the form of colloquial language, dialect, idiolect, and the like.
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Television dialogue adheres to this literary trend and (typically) strives to deliver lifelike dialogues. In translating them, subtitles are also expected to hold traces of fictive orality.
3.4.2.1. Fictive orality in scripted dialogue
The transcripts of the CoPP consist of the words heard in the series, in accordance with the framework proposed by Zabalbeascoa (2008a) for the study of the audiovisual text (§3.1), and transcribe verbatim what the characters utter in the fictional world.
Traditionally, the literature on audiovisual products has mainly focused on visual elements and technical aspects such as editing, while words ‘tend to take more often than not a secondary, marginal position’ (Díaz-Cintas 2008a: 3). Baños (2009) draws attention to the fact that it is the discipline of Translation Studies that has mainly contributed to the description of the features of audiovisual discourse from a linguistic point of view, thanks to the works of scholars like Pavesi (2005) and Romero-Fresco (2009b, 2011). Outside TS, relevant studies are those produced by Quaglio (2009), Bednarek (2012) and Forchini (2012).
