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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.
List of contents
Contents: Norms: A cross-disciplinary concern - The verbal component of the audiovisual text - Corpus presentation - Morphosyntactic analysis I: Quantitative approach - Morphosyntactic analysis II: Qualitative approach - Lexical analysis I: Quantitative approach - Lexical analysis II: Qualitative approach.
About the author
Blanca Arias-Badia is a research fellow at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), where she teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses on subtitling and audiovisual translation research. She holds a PhD in Translation and Language Sciences from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) in Barcelona. She has undertaken research stays at King¿s College London, University College London and the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). Her main research interests are audiovisual translation and accessibility. She is a member of TransMedia Catalonia (UAB) and InfoLex (UPF), and she leads knowledge transfer projects at the Catalan Association for the Promotion of Accessibility (ACPA). She also works as a translator and proofreader.
