Subtitling Television Series. Blanca Arias-Badia
in the study of TV dialogue, since screenwriters are not necessarily aware of the linguistic strategies to which they resort to produce lifelike texts. For Lengsfield (2016), the author of a manual for screenwriting trainees, the goal is to make dialogue conversational, but Quaglio (2009: 10) notes that, frequently, professional tips simply ‘rely on native-speaker intuition’ and fail to provide ‘linguistic information regarding the features that characterize “conversational style”’.
From the professional, non-didactic point of view, screenwriters seem to base their approach to writing on the transgression of norms. In Nickell (2008: online), James Manos Jr, Dexter’s creator, states:
As a screenwriter, syntax and grammar are the least of our concerns, in fact, the general rule of thumb is the more literate, the less chance the movie will ever get made. So I had to whip out my old ‘Warriners’ on English grammar.
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This apparent disregard of language can be observed in academia, where prototypical features of orality in TV dialogue have been little researched (Guillot 2007). In recent years, the situation has improved and some empirical studies have elucidated that ‘the grammar of movie and face-to-face conversation does not differ’ (Forchini 2012: 120). Such argument is used by the scholar to revalorise the study of the language used in the movies, which Sinclair (2004b: 80) had regarded as ‘not likely to be representative of the general usage of conversation’. Forchini (ibid.) is not the only one to defend the postulate that movie language is not very different from real conversation. Authors like Spitz (2005: 532) claim that dialogue ‘closely resembles ordinary talk’ and Quaglio (2009: 140) concludes that there are ‘striking linguistic similarities’ between the dialogue used in the series Friends and naturally occurring conversation.
For other scholars, the extent to which the dialogue of audiovisual texts portrays naturalness and spontaneity is, necessarily, limited. Díaz-Cintas (2003) lists some of the strategies employed in TV dialogue to evoke orality, such as the use of unfinished sentences or unconventional syntax. The literature has referred to this as ‘selective naturalism’, defined by Davis (2008: 48, in Richardson 2010: 69) as:
the style of writing which attempts to faithfully imitate dialogue as we normally speak it, but, unnoticed, manages to omit all those passages – not only beginnings and endings but also all sorts of other uninteresting sections – which would add nothing to the production. For it is not enough merely to imitate life: scripts are not straight, one-for-one imitations of slabs of life. In selective naturalism they are crafted, moulded to appear as if they were.
Richardson (2010: 69) recuperates the notion of selective naturalism and argues that ‘[b];ecause of its representational character, television dialogue is different from both primary, face-to-face interaction and from media talk’. Bartoll (2012: 25, my translation) highlights the idea of limited resemblance to face-to-face conversation:
If we recorded a spontaneous conversation it would be very difficult not just to translate it, but also to understand it. […] Often, written film scripts include non-canonical elements to facilitate, precisely, naturalness. The fact that the audiovisual text has been previously prepared […] causes it to hold features of the language of distance, in spite of the fact that its intention is precisely the opposite one.
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To give the impression of spontaneity, a few brushes here and there seem to be enough. In their textbook on screenwriting, Wolff and Cox (1988: 56) consider that naturalness is limited in TV dialogue, and suggest the following to the reader: ‘[M];ake your words seem lifelike, but not so much that they impede the flow of meaning and the forward progression of the information you want to impart’. As described by Matamala (2008: 79), interjections are one of the linguistic devices used by sitcom writers to produce exchanges that are ‘agile, lively and colloquial’. And Mattsson (2009: 29) claims that the use of discourse particles can suffice, on occasions, to exemplify the differences between spontaneous conversation and film dialogue: ‘The overuse of discourse particles, which now and then is an element of authentic speech, does not exist in film dialogue unless there is reason for it to illustrate certain characteristics’. In the case of Catalan, Bartoll (2012) briefly describes some of the strategies activated to preserve the features of oral language in the subtitles.
Another aspect discussed in textbooks is the ephemeral nature of TV dialogue. McKee’s (1997: 389) suggestions on understandability and economy of language are similar to the advice given to professional subtitlers: ‘screen dialogue requires compression and economy. Screen dialogue must say the maximum in the fewest possible words. […] Remember, film is not a novel; dialogue is spoken and gone’. Trottier’s (1998
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