Towards a Methodology for the Analysis of Neutralisation in Spanish Subtitling

Abstract

Comunicació presentada al 7th AIETI Conference AIETI7: new horizons in translation and Interpreting studies, celebrada a Málaga del 29 al 31 de gener

Throughout the Spanish-speaking world, people watch films and TV serials originally made in English and other languages, either dubbed or subtitled into Spanish. The wording used for the Spanish subtitles is constrained by space and time. An additional constraint, less widely recognized, is comprehensibility. The research reported in this paper shows that translators tend, possibly unconsciously, to neutralize colourful language present in the source texts. Typically, expressions such as 'He's like a kid on a sugar rush' are neutralized in Spanish to 'Es como un niño lleno de energía' (He's like a kid full of energy). Perhaps in some cases translators do this in order to make the texts more easily comprehensible. No doubt, in other cases, the literal translation of the creative unit in the source text does not work in the target language, or no direct equivalent is readily available. Whatever the reasons, the cumulative effect is that translated texts in subtitles tend to be more neutral and less attention-grabbing than the source texts, and this tendency is sometimes most noticeable at crucial points in the plot development. While the specialized literature has acknowledged the phenomenon of neutralisation in subtitling (Zaro 2001: 59-60; Díaz-Cintas 2003: 286; Bartoll 2012: 158), the conducted studies have not focused on the phenomenon of neutralisation, so it still has not been described in depth nor in a systematic manner. This paper reports a detailed corpus-driven study of neutralisation in three different American crime TV shows, i.e. Dexter (2006), The Mentalist (2008) and Castle (2009) for each episode, the corpus contains the transcript of the source text and the DVD subtitled version in Castilian Spanish. A preliminary analysis demonstrated that, in this corpus, neutralisation occurs mainly at lexical level. Therefore, the methodology employed in this study involves corpus pattern analysis and the distinction made by Hanks (2004, 2013) between norms and exploitations. The stress of the study is laid on metaphorical uses, puns and other creative uses of language. Each sentence of both the ST and the TT is scrutinised in order to detect exploitations that affect the semantics of the discourse. To date, this corpus analysis methodology for the study of lexicon has been applied mainly in the field of lexicography. Adopting it for the study of an audiovisual corpus enables us, on the one hand, to detect where neutralisation takes place in the transfer of content from the ST to the TT; and, on the other, to gather quantitative results about a generalised neutrality of the Spanish subtitles of crime fiction series.

This work was co-funded by the research programme of the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, within the framework of the project La representación de la combinatoria léxica en los diccionarios de aprendizaje: nuevos métodos para nuevos diccionarios (Ref: FFI2012-37654, PI: Dr Sergi Torner Castells), as well as by the UPF-IULA PhD mobility grant program (COFRE) and the Formación de Profesorado PhD scholarship program of the Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte (FPU).