Subtitling Television Series. Blanca Arias-Badia
this would be a rather unfeasible goal as the study could cover an unlimited range of linguistic aspects of TV dialogue and subtitling. The corpus-driven approach, however, prevents very specific questions from being drawn, since fine-grained research questions are typically the result of preconceptions or prior knowledge about the material in hand – and, as stated, this goes against the nature of corpus-driven analyses, which try to keep preconceptions to a ←5 | 6→minimum. Thus, from a general point of view the study strives to answer the three following research questions (RQ) which, as will be seen in the subsequent chapters, only become specific as corpus research advances:
RQ1.What are the main syntactic and lexical features of the source text (ST) and the target text (TT) in the CoPP, in connection to their hypothetical nature as intermediate genres in the continuum from spoken to written language?
RQ2.More specifically, what are the most salient features of fictive orality in the STs and the TTs?
RQ3.Are TV dialogue and subtitling genre-oriented?
The study seeks to find out how – if at all – TV dialogue and subtitling differ with regard to the occurrence in them of signs of fictive orality. Broadly speaking, the literature suggests that TV dialogue holds elaborate features of fictive orality affecting both the levels of syntax and lexicon, whereas subtitles have been reported to make use of rather simple, unmarked or standard language. Given the fact that interlingual subtitling involves transfer from one language into another, some of the results yielded by the study may reveal differences in the language system (English or Spanish) instead of differences in text type (TV dialogue or subtitling). The combination of corpus-based and corpus-driven techniques is expected to shed light on this contrastive analysis.
This introduction details the aim and scope of the study, the research questions underpinning it and the methodological approach adopted. The following chapters introduce the framework for the research conducted and present the results of the analyses. More specifically, the book is structured as follows.
Chapter 2 employs the cross-disciplinary notion of norm as a unifying thread to discuss the importance of identifying patterns of behaviour in ←6 | 7→the three disciplines directly connected to the study here reported; namely, Television Studies, Linguistics and Translation Studies. Consequently, the chapter shows how norms invariably refer to identifiable patterns of behaviour either in the form of genre invariants of TV fiction, prototypical features of spoken or written language, or recurrent types of translation solutions, all of which are traceable by means of corpus-driven research.
Chapter 3 sets out the framework of the two objects of study: scripted dialogue and subtitles. It provides theoretical information deemed relevant for interpreting the results of the study and summarises the main 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