Table 70. Quantitative analysis of morphosyntactic features of the CoPP
Table 71. Quantitative analysis of lexical features of the CoPP
←xxiii | xxiv→←0 | 1→
New Trends in Translation Studies
Volume 29
Series Editor:
Professor Jorge Díaz Cintas
Advisory Board:
Professor Susan Bassnett
Dr Lynne Bowker
Professor Frederic Chaume
Professor Aline Remael
PETER LANG
Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • New York • Wien
The fact that television series have become crucial cultural products of our time is well known. Today, series know no physical borders, have progressively gained ground and occupy a privileged position in entertainment. Extensive access to audiovisual products, which are now available from a variety of online platforms, as well as in more traditional formats such as DVD or Blu-Ray, has been accompanied by an increasing demand for audiovisual translation (AVT).
Unsurprisingly, research into AVT has experienced a parallel boom in the past few years. The field is primarily concerned with the above-mentioned ‘pervasive presence of the image and the word in our society’ (Díaz-Cintas 2008a: 6) and the interplay between both. It is crucial to note that studies of AVT not only let us know how audiovisual products are transferred from one language community to another one; importantly, they also help reveal the nature of the source products themselves, especially when it comes to the language used. Film and Television Studies and Media Studies have traditionally focused on other areas, such as editing, photography (the image), genre classification or themes, and have neglected the study of the word, whereas AVT has typically taken the source dialogue within the audiovisual text as the natural object of comparison when accounting for translations.
Thus, a study of scripted TV series dialogue and its translation, like the one reported in this volume, has the potential to shed light on the language to which both source and target audiences are exposed while ←1 | 2→watching hit television crime series. The aim of the book is to describe the main linguistic features of scripted dialogue and Spanish DVD subtitles of US crime fiction series. More specifically, the following chapters detail analyses conducted on American English TV dialogue and the variety of Spanish spoken in the Iberian Peninsula, known as Castilian Spanish. Thus, the study is interdisciplinary in that its findings touch on no less than three intertwined fields of knowledge; namely, Television Studies, Linguistics and Translation Studies (TS).
Within the study, emphasis is placed on the spoken-to-written conversion entailed in subtitling, and the written creation of the TV dialogue to be spoken. Screenwriters and subtitlers are advised to resort to lifelike language so as to lend plausibility to their characters and stories, which has paved the way for their products to be considered holders of signs of fictive orality. The current analysis provides details about the language features prototypically attributed to the spoken and written language most frequently found in the dialogues and in the subtitles.
The fact that emphasis is placed on language transfer means that, of the three mentioned disciplines, this study is more associated with the field of Translation Studies. More specifically, this is a descriptive study on AVT. Over the past decade, numerous voices have called for the need to further develop the area of Audiovisual Translation, which has an undisputed impact on today’s society but has, until relatively recently, been regarded as the ‘stepdaughter’ (Nagel et al. 2009: 49) of an academic discipline, Translation Studies, which first began to develop independently in the 1990s.
Since it has often been concerned with entertainment productions, AVT has been regarded as the ‘relaxed face’ of TS.2 While areas such as literary translation have been lucky enough to be nurtured by a solid academic tradition in the study of literature (Karamitroglou 2000: 10), Film and Television Studies are a relatively new discipline and little effort has been devoted to the exploration of the language used in television. According to Quaglio (2009: 10), despite having ←2 | 3→resorted to conversation analysis in some instances – which is an area within Linguistics – Television Studies have essentially focused on sociocultural and ideological aspects.
Language, however, is precisely the only part of the audiovisual product that may be altered by translation professionals (Romero-Fresco 2009a: 70, 2012: 185). Also AVT may be regarded as a young area of specialisation within Translation Studies, having grown mainly in the 2000s (Gambier 2004). For the specific case of studies into subtitling, Díaz-Cintas (2004) offers a thorough account of the ‘the long journey to academic acknowledgement’ involved in this type of research, stymied until recently.
Previous works have provided details about the language features of film dialogue and subtitling. This has typically been in the form of manuals aimed at trainees, both in screenwriting and AVT. Therefore, the examples offered in these works are not intended to be exhaustive about the texture of scripts or subtitles, but rather have sought to offer a ‘panoramic overview’ of these types of text by means of illustration, as occasionally explained by the authors themselves (Díaz-Cintas 2003: 219). Empirical research pursuing a holistic linguistic description of lexical and syntactic features of TV dialogue and AVT is scarce. Typically, studies have been corpus-based and focused on a specific language feature, while the number of works interested in a more panoramic overview of the language of TV series and their translation is much more restricted, with a few relevant exceptions, such as Baños’s (2009) investigation of features of fictive orality in the dubbing and local production of sitcoms; Blum’s (2013) analysis of different fictional characters’ idiolect and its dubbing; Quaglio’s (2009) and Forchini’s (2012) corpus-based approaches to film dialogue; or Reviers et al.’s (2015) and Matamala’s (2018)
