Subtitling Television Series. Blanca Arias-Badia
ultimately matters is perhaps not the universals, which we can never finally confirm anyway, but new knowledge of the patterns, and patterns of patterns, which helps us to make sense of what we are looking at.
Scholars seem to agree that the main advantage of Translation Studies undertaken with corpora is the possibility to gather more significant quantitative data (Martínez Sierra 2011; Díaz-Cintas 2008a). On the other hand, three shortcomings of corpus methodology are:
a) text alignment or KWIC concordances may hinder identification of suprasegmental phenomena (Malmkjær 1998; Laviosa 2002; Zabalbeascoa 2004);
b) it is difficult to draw the line between tendencies and norms, which depend on corpora representativeness (Tognini-Bonelli 2001; Corpas Pastor and Seghiri 2007, 2010, 2016; Martínez Sierra 2011);
c) for the specific case of AVT, ‘corpus investigations focusing exclusively on the verbal component are at risk of overlooking the importance of the other semiotic codes to the meaning making process in audiovisual products’ (Díaz-Cintas 2008a: 3).
By adopting a corpus-driven approach, the present study aims to uncover patterns of types of solutions, tendencies or norms that point at decision-making in the English–Spanish subtitling of a selection of TV shows.
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Chapter 3 The verbal component of the audiovisual text
The foregoing chapters have reported how DTS stress the importance of analysing real data. In this study, real data are obtained from the CoPP, which includes English transcripts of scripted dialogue, and Spanish subtitles. Both types of text, like any instance of language production, occur in context and are never presented in isolation, as they constitute partial elements of the whole audiovisual text. Therefore, it seems not possible to single out specific linguistic features of the texts without taking the picture and complete soundtrack into account.
Thus, while the parallel corpus under study is restricted to verbal elements, this chapter is firstly concerned with their contextualisation within the broader audiovisual text, which is vital for the qualitative study of the series’ syntax and lexicon. It further aims to provide an overview of the main findings regarding the linguistic characterisation of TV dialogue and subtitling to date.
The narratological nature of film and television material paves the way for Television Studies to borrow terms and concepts from Literary Studies. Typically, this borrowing implies the updating and adaptation of definitions to meet the needs of the newer discipline. This is the case with the notion of text. As explained by Tous-Rovirosa (2008), Rastier (2001) made a case for the widening of the traditional notion of linguistic text to embrace both the traditional idea of text and the audiovisual and multimedial text, in which verbal and nonverbal information are ←21 | 22→conveyed via the visual and audio channels. As Bartoll (2015) points out, however, scarce specific literature has been available about the nature of the audiovisual text until recently. Among the works available, important contributions have been actually made from the perspective of AVT.
When defining audiovisual texts, emphasis has been recurrently placed on the interplay of semiotic codes as well as on the challenges that they pose for professional translators (Delabastita 1989; Chaume 2004a; Zabalbeascoa 2008a). Scholars in AVT have described an essentially binary conception of codes in the audiovisual text, grouped into ‘codes belonging to the image, and codes belonging to the sound (words, music and noise)’ (Díaz-Cintas 2001: 182).
Chaume (2003; 2004a), in turn, proposes a model for the communication process in AVT, by establishing two types of narrative in the audiovisual text, that is, visual and acoustic, the latter including verbal elements such as dialogue or monologue, as well as paralinguistic information. His model is further developed by Zabalbeascoa (2008a), who assigns four components to the audiovisual text: (a) words heard, (b) words read, (c) instrumental music and special sound effects, and (d) the moving images and photography. These components fall into a twofold categorisation, according to their channel of communication – audio or visual – and their type of sign – verbal or nonverbal – as shown in Table 2.
Table 2. Four components of the audiovisual text (from Zabalbeascoa 2008a: 24)
| Audio | Visual | |
| Verbal | Words heard | Words read |
| Non-verbal | Instrumental music + special sound effects | Moving images Photography |
A crucial point made in the literature is that both the verbal and the nonverbal narratives are perceived at the same time by audiences via the audio and the visual channels. In this sense, Bartoll (2012) contributes to the definition of audiovisual text by explicitly foregrounding the dynamism that exists between the various channels of communication. Zabalbeascoa ←22 | 23→(1997) explains that AVT works as a system of priorities and restrictions in the pursuit of balance between iconic and verbal language. In addition, it is a fact that only the linguistic code within the audiovisual text can be altered by the translator (Romero-Fresco 2009a, 2012), and Díaz-Cintas (2001: 182) concedes: ‘one could argue that the most relevant signs to the translation are the verbal ones’.
What follows from this debate is that each of the CoPP episodes can be considered an audiovisual text in itself while, at the same time, being partial segments of larger audiovisual texts, that is, the season to which they belong, and the series. The compiled corpus comprises the verbal component of the schema presented in Table 2. Specifically, it is composed of words heard (ST, English dialogue) and words read (TT, Spanish subtitles), acknowledging that ‘subtitles are only a part of the audiovisual programme’ (Díaz-Cintas and Remael 2007: 110). The fact that audiences being exposed to subtitled material are presented with a double verbal component, in the form of source soundtrack and translation, has led experts to speak of the vulnerability of subtitling due to its nature as an overt type of translation (Díaz-Cintas 2003; Díaz-Cintas and Remael 2007; Bartoll 2012,