Subtitling Television Series. Blanca Arias-Badia

      PETER LANG

      Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • New York • Wien

Chapter 1 Introduction ¹

      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