Television dialogue and subtitling: a corpus-driven study of police procedurals

Arias Badia, Blanca

Television dialogue and subtitling: a corpus-driven study of police procedurals

Document Type

Doctoral thesis
Published Version

Author

Arias Badia, Blanca

Director

Torner Castells, Sergi
Brumme, Jenny

Publication Date

2017-07-10

Pages

347 p.

Citation

Arias Badia, B. Television dialogue and subtitling: a corpus-driven study of police procedurals. Universitat Pompeu Fabra; 2017. handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10803/404733

This citation was generated automatically.

Doctoral program

Programa de doctorat en Traducció i Ciències del Llenguatge

Abstract

The specialised literature has suggested the intermediate position of television dialogue and subtitling along the continuum from spoken to written language (e.g. Díaz-Cintas 2003; Quaglio 2009; Forchini 2012). This dissertation adopts a corpus-driven methodology to tackle this issue from a descriptive, contrastive point of view. It reports on results of the analysis of the Corpus of Police Procedurals (CoPP), a corpus containing the transcribed dialogue (EN) and the DVD subtitling (ES) of fifteen episodes of three contemporary police procedurals, namely Dexter (Showtime, 2006), The Mentalist (Warner Bros, 2008), and Castle (ABC, 2009). A selection of syntactic and lexical features typically attributed to either poles of the continuum have been scrutinized from a quantitative and a qualitative approach. The statistical basis of the quantitative study allows identification of patterns of behaviour (i.e. norms) on the dialogue creators’ and the subtitlers’ part. Qualitative lexical analysis adapts the corpus pattern analysis (CPA) methodology proposed by Hanks (esp. 2004, 2013a), to date used for lexicographic purposes only, for the study of lexical exploitation, i.e. creativity, in this type of texts.
La bibliografía especializada ha sugerido la posición del diálogo televisivo y del subtitulado como géneros intermedios en el continuo oralidad-escritura (p. ej. Díaz-Cintas 2003, Quaglio 2009; Forchini 2012). Esta tesis adopta la metodología corpus-driven (‘dirigida por el corpus’) para abordar esta cuestión desde un punto de vista descriptivo y contrastivo, a partir del análisis del Corpus of Police Procedurals (CoPP), un corpus compilado para los propósitos de esta investigación que contiene, alineados, el diálogo (EN) y el subtitulado para DVD (ES) de quince capítulos de tres series de ficción policíaca procesal contemporáneas: Dexter (Showtime, 2006), El mentalista (Warner Bros, 2008) y Castle (ABC, 2009). Una selección de rasgos sintácticos y léxicos prototípicamente atribuidos a ambos polos del continuo han sido examinados tanto cuantitativa como cualitativamente. La base estadística de los análisis cuantitativos llevados a cabo revela patrones de comportamiento (normas) en los creadores del diálogo ficcional y en sus traductores. El análisis cualitativo del léxico adapta la metodología lexicográfica de análisis de patrones de corpus (CPA) propuesta por Hanks (esp. 2004, 2013a) para el estudio de la explotación léxica (creatividad) en este tipo de textos.

Keywords

Audiovisual translation, Subtitling, Television dialogue, Scripted dialogue, Fictive orality, Police procedural, Television series, Spoken language, Written language, Neuter language, Corpus-driven research, Corpus-based research, Norms, Audiovisual text, Coordination, Subordination, Ellipsis, Syntactic order, Number disagreement, Aboutness, Discriminant analysis, Lexical density, Terminological density, Creative lexicon, Anomalous collocation, Metaphor, Coercion, Hyperbole, Euphemism, Expressive neology, Language exploitation, Offensive language, Affective language, Vocabulary richness, Information load, Question tags, Tagging