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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 associated with the field of Translation Studies. More specifically, this is a descriptive 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.

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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 the CoPP. Without further specification, 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.

1.3. Chapter organisation

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.

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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.