findings made in the literature on TV dialogue and subtitling to date. The primary focus of this literature review is on prior research centred on American English STs and Castilian Spanish TTs.
Chapter 4 describes the corpus of analysis by presenting figures on corpus extension and technical details about the compilation and alignment process. After consideration of the selected genre – police procedurals – the chapter reports on the specific features of each of the three TV series. This is the first chapter to show empirical results from the preliminary study of two aspects of the corpus: it reports on types of interaction among characters in the pilot episode of each series and it provides technical details about the arrangement of the subtitles on screen by contrasting the TT with the standards for professional subtitling practice.
Chapter 5 reports on the quantitative analysis of syntactic features of the corpus. Statistical measures are applied to the distribution of morphosyntactic categories across the episodes in the corpus and to features signalling sentence complexity, such as sentence length, occurrence of coordinated and subordinated structures, occurrence of independent noun phrases and number of verbs per sentence.
Chapter 6 complements Chapter 5 with a qualitative approach to the syntax of the corpus. It is divided into two parts: the first one looks at a selection of signs of fictive orality, such as altered constituent order, use of ellipsis, question tags and number disagreement. The second part reports on syntactic criteria in subtitle segmentation in the CoPP.
Chapter 7 presents the quantitative results of the lexical analysis undertaken on the corpus. The features under statistical analysis include the following: corpus aboutness (studied by means of discriminant analysis), ←7 | 8→lexical density and vocabulary richness, information load, and terminological density.
Chapter 8 adopts a qualitative standpoint to explore three types of lexical units that the specialised literature has regarded as susceptible of neutralisation in subtitling: pejorative, affective and creative language. The emphasis in the chapter is placed on the latter. In order to study this, a specific corpus annotation methodology, known as Corpus Pattern Analysis, which is based on the Theory of Norms and Exploitations (Hanks 2004, 2013a) and is commonly used in dictionary making and lexicology, has been specifically adapted.
Lastly, conclusions from each analysis chapter are revisited and discussed together in Chapter 9. A discussion and interpretation of the main results is provided, limitations of the study are considered and further lines of research are suggested.
←8 | 9→
1 This publication has been partially funded by the Institute for Applied Linguistics (IULA) at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain). The study reported in this book was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport (ref. FPU13/01805).
2 Martínez Sierra (2011: 168) makes this point in advocating AVT research as a rigorous branch of Translation Studies.
Chapter 2 Norms: A cross-disciplinary concern
As already discussed, the current study may be circumscribed to three main disciplines, namely Television Studies, Linguistics, and Translation Studies. This chapter is concerned with a notion that lies across these three disciplines and is key to the contents of this volume: norms. A look at the definition of norm in a dictionary is enough to gather information about the ambivalence surrounding this concept and the ideas typically attributed to it. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word as being used to describe something usual, standard, expected, following a pattern, while the Merriam Webster alerts the reader that norm is associated with proper behaviour, thus suggesting the prescriptive value of the term.
The twofold nature of norms, that is, their prescriptive and descriptive nature, was already present when the term was coined in the field of Sociology in the 1930s. Since then, the term has been adopted by several other fields, among which the three disciplines that converge in the present book. It is the descriptive sense of the term norm that underpins the present book. Its goal is to observe tendencies, patterns of behaviour in TV productions and their translations.
2.1. Norms in Film and Television Studies
The corpus compilation criteria for this book rest on the assumption that audiovisual texts may be classified as belonging to different genres. The notion of genre dates back to classical rhetorics. Already in the fourth century bc, Aristotle defined it in terms of convention and purpose in ←9 | 10→his Poetics and proposed that each genre has a specific style or mode of expression, that is, epic (narrative), tragic (drama) and lyric (poetry). The term has been widely used in many areas of specialisation, crucially in Linguistics and Literary Theory, though in more recent years has been regarded as too global and fuzzy a concept to be of much use to detailed formal and functional analysis by some practitioners.
Film and Television Studies being a far younger discipline than Literature Studies, has meant that theorists in the former discipline have drawn on the advances made in the latter in an attempt to account for genres in the televisual field. Feuer (1992) considers television genre a means of classification of plot types, envisaged to reveal similarities and differences among textual types. Her definition closely resembles theoretical proposals from the field of Literature, such as Wellek and Warren’s (1963/1949), Frye’s (2002/1952), Todorov’s (1976) or Ryan’s (1988/1979). Neale and Turner (2001: 1) are clear about the overlap of literary and television studies when it comes to the study of genre, paying special attention to the concept of norm:
‘Genre’ is a French word meaning ‘type’ or ‘kind’. As such, it has played an important role in the study of literature, theatre, film, television and other art and media forms. It has long been recognised that output in each of these fields can be grouped into categories, and that each category or class is marked by a particular set of conventions, features and norms.
As noted by these scholars, ‘[g];enre is the product of a text- and audience-based negotiation activated by the viewer’s expectations’ (ibid.: 7). This idea of genre as key contextual information for audiences is also pointed out by Bednarek (2010: 120), who states that ‘how viewers/practitioners describe/view characters may depend on the genre of the particular fictional television narrative’. It is important to note, however, that viewers’ expectations may not be conscious.
Once that recognition has been acknowledged as indispensable to identify genres, the question arises as to whether this feature is also fulfilling other functions in the production and reception of TV products. The first function that scholars have deemed central to it is sense attribution (Wolf 1985:
