Subtitling Television Series. Blanca Arias-Badia
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) linguistic account of audio description corpora.
This introduction starts with a foreword to the corpus-driven approach adopted (§1.1), which is further discussed in Chapter 2. Section 1.2 presents the research questions connected to the descriptive aim of the research. Lastly, Section 1.3 summarises the content to be found in each of the subsequent chapters.
←3 | 4→
1.1. The corpus-driven approach
In his seminal book, Toury (1995: 5, 11, 15) repeatedly alludes to a corpus or problem as the object of study of Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS). By focusing on a practical challenge for subtitlers, that is, the translation of fictive orality, the present monograph reports on a corpus study.
TS have long worked with digitised corpora, especially since the mid-1990s (Baker 1995). In TS, Corpus Linguistics is borrowed as a methodology ‘to study many of the processes involved in transferring information, ideas and concepts from one language to another’ (Picchi and Peters 1997: 253).
For the purposes of this research, the Corpus of Police Procedurals (CoPP) has been compiled. It is an English–Spanish parallel corpus including the source dialogue transcript and the DVD subtitles of 15 episodes of contemporary police procedurals; five episodes from three different TV series: Castle (ABC, 2009), Dexter (Showtime, 2006) and The Mentalist (Warner Bros, 2008).
The approach to the corpus has been data-driven. This means that preconceptions about the language material to be found in TV dialogue and subtitling have been kept to a minimum, and have been used exclusively to serve as a guideline to the research questions presented in the following section. Accordingly, manual annotation of the corpus has been undertaken from scratch and the results presented in this volume are those that have been qualitatively deemed as most relevant. Two sets of data have been annotated: syntactic and lexical. While ‘[a];n analysis of specific linguistic features necessarily shows a partial view of the data’ (Saldanha 2009: online), the selection has been intended to be as impartial as possible, in accordance with the recommendations made for corpus-driven translation research.
The corpus-driven methodology adopted has been complemented with corpus-based approaches that have allowed for a closer look at aspects discussed in specialised literature on spoken and written language. The analyses have combined quantitative and qualitative approaches on the basis that ‘the two approaches have complementary strengths and weaknesses’ (Biber 1988: 52). As specified by Keith (2008), quantitative studies entail ←4 | 5→data reduction, inference, discovery of relationships and exploration of processes that may have a basis in probability; thus, their scope is useful for the purposes of this study seeking to find norms. Qualitative approaches to corpora, on the other hand, ‘enable very fine distinctions to be drawn’ (McEnery and Wilson 1996: 70), which is an added value for descriptive research.
1.2. Aim and research questions
In his exploration of the genre of the novel, Bakhtin (2004/1981: 416) proposed the idea that ‘it makes no sense to describe ‘the language of the novel’ because the very object of such a description, the novel’s unitary language, does not exist’. Along the same line, this book does not intend to define the language of police procedurals and their subtitling, which, similarly, is not unitary. Rather, a corpus of three different series has been compiled in order to gather data to answer the research questions below. The series have been selected to be comparable among themselves (Chapter 4), so as to foster the detection of norms in dialogue construction and translation of the genre, which motivates the decision to refer to ‘police procedurals’ or ‘crime fiction’ in general throughout the book. Careful extrapolation of the results found in each production, in relation to the identification of genre norms, has been supported with the help of statistics, which have been used to assess the significance of the differences observed in the quantitative analyses of the CoPP.
This study pursues a linguistic characterisation of the dialogue and subtitling of