Subtitling Television Series: A Corpus-Driven Study of Police Procedurals (New Trends in Translation Studies)

Television series are regarded as significant works of popular culture in today’s society, which explains the increasing demand to translate them into other languages to reach larger audiences. This book focuses on one of the two most common modes of audiovisual translation for this type of product: subtitling. The naturalness that is expected in television dialogue together with the spoken-to-written medium conversion entailed in subtitling pose a challenge for professionals, who have been typically blamed for neutralising the source dialogue. Little to no empirical evidence, however, has been provided to effectively address this issue to date. This book offers a contrastive study of the American English television dialogue and the Castilian Spanish subtitles of three popular police procedurals: Castle (2009), Dexter (2006) and The Mentalist (2008). After introducing some basic notions to frame the study – such as translation norms, audiovisual text and fictive orality – more than twenty lexical and morphosyntactic features in the series are analysed from a qualitative and quantitative point of view. Throughout the chapters, a combination of corpus-based and corpus-driven methodologies are used to offer a sound, empirically grounded characterisation of the language employed in these audiovisual productions and their translations. Cover Contents Acknowledgements List of Charts List of Figures List of Screenshots List of Tables Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1. The corpus-driven approach 1.2. Aim and research questions 1.3. Chapter organisation Chapter 2 Norms: A cross-disciplinary concern 2.1. Norms in Film and Television Studies 2.2. Norms in Linguistics 2.3. Norms in Translation Studies Chapter 3 The verbal component of the audiovisual text 3.1. The audiovisual text 3.2. Verbal language within the audiovisual text 3.3. Linguistic features of subtitling 3.3.1. The hybrid nature of subtitling 3.3.2. Syntactic features of subtitling 3.3.3. Lexical features of subtitling 3.4. Subtitling scripted dialogue: The challenge of fictive orality 3.4.1. The continuum between spoken and written language 3.4.2. Fictive orality Chapter 4 Corpus presentation 4.1. Genre-oriented criteria in corpus compilation 4.2. Police procedurals 4.3. The Corpus of Police Procedurals (CoPP) 4.3.1. The series under study: Dexter (2006), The Mentalist (2008), and Castle (2009) 4.3.2. Methodological considerations: Corpus compilation, alignment, and exploitation 4.3.3. Language variation and interaction contexts in the CoPP series 4.3.4. Subtitling standards Chapter 5 Morphosyntactic analysis I: Quantitative approach 5.1. Distribution of parts of speech 5.1.1. Feature description and research methodology 5.1.2. Results and discussion 5.2. Sentence distribution and complexity 5.2.1. Number of sentences per subtitle 5.2.2. Types of clauses 5.2.3. Sentence length 5.2.4. Coordination 5.2.5. Subordination 5.2.6. Verbs per sentence 5.2.7. Nominal clauses 5.3. Summary Chapter 6 Morphosyntactic analysis II: Qualitative approach 6.1. Fictive orality in the syntax of the CoPP 6.1.1. Methodological considerations 6.1.2. Altered constituent order 6.1.3. Ellipsis 6.1.4. Question tags 6.1.5. Number disagreement 6.2. Segmentation in the CoPP 6.2.1. Methodological considerations 6.2.2. Segmentation in two-line subtitles 6.2.3. Segmentation of sentences across subtitles 6.3. Summary Chapter 7 Lexical analysis I: Quantitative approach 7.1. Aboutness 7.1.1. Feature description and research methodology 7.1.2. Results 7.1.3. Discussion 7.2. Lexical density and vocabulary richness 7.2.1. Feature description and research methodology 7.2.2. Results 7.2.3. Discussion 7.3. Information load 7.3.1. Feature description and research methodology 7.3.2. Results 7.3.3. Discussion 7.4. Terminological density 7.4.1. Feature description and research methodology 7.4.2. Results 7.4.3. Discussion 7.5. Summary Chapter 8 Lexical analysis II: Qualitative approach 8.1. Offensive and affective lexicon 8.1.1. Feature description and research methodology 8.1.2. Occurrence in the ST and their translation in the TT 8.2. Creative lexicon 8.2.1. Theoretical and methodological framework for the analysis of lexical exploitation 8.2.2. Adapting corpus pattern analysis for the study of TV dialogue and subtitling 8.2.3. Lexical exploitation and conventionalised ‘pseudocreativity’ 8.2.4. Lexical exploitation in the CoPP 8.3. Summary Chapter 9 Conclusions 9.1. Fictive orality in TV dialogue and subtitling: Main findings 9.2. The perception of subtitles as exhibiting neutral register 9.3. A genre-oriented approach 9.4. Back to norms 9.5. Limitations and future research Bibliography Index "Television series are regarded as significant works of culture in today's society, which explains the increasing demand for their translations in order to reach larger audiences. This book focuses on one of the two most spread modes of audiovisual translation for this type of product, i.e. subtitling. Due to the naturalness presumably sought in television dialogue, the spoken-to-written medium conversion entailed in subtitling poses a challenge for professionals, who have been typically accused of neutralising the source material. Little to no empirical evidence, however, has been provided to effectively address this issue to date. This book offers a contrastive study of the American English television dialogue and the Castilian Spanish subtitles of three popular police procedurals, i.e. Castle (ABC, 2009), Dexter (Showtime, 2006), and The Mentalist (Warner Bros, 2008). After introducing some basic notions to frame the study (such as translational norms, the audiovisual text, and fictive orality), more than 20 lexical and morphosyntactic features in the series are considered from a qualitative and quantitative point of view. Throughout the chapters, a combination of corpus-based and corpus-driven methodologies is argued to form the basis for a sound, empirically-grounded characterisation of the language of these audiovisual products and their translation"-- Provided by publisher