‘That is so cool’: investigating the translation of adverbial intensifiers in English-Spanish dubbing through a parallel corpus of sitcoms

Abstract

Although fictional dialogue differs notably from spontaneous conversation, scriptwriters use linguistic features that are typical of naturally-occurring conversation to achieve realistic dialogues. In the case of sitcoms, the type of discourse being mirrored is colloquial conversation, which is characterised by the use of emphatic language. Intensifiers are one of the many linguistic features associated with emotionally-loaded language in colloquial conversation in English and in Spanish. Research has also shown that adverbial intensifiers (such as ‘very’, ‘so’, ‘really’, ‘totally’, ‘pretty’, etc.) are also common in fictional dialogue, specifically in the TV series Friends. Taking into consideration the prevalence of adverbial intensifiers in Friends and the role they play in fictional dialogue, this paper sets out to explore how they have been dubbed into Spanish. The aim is to delve into the characteristics of Spanish dubbed dialogue and to find out if the translator resorts to features that are typical of spontaneous conversation in Spanish to convey intensification, or if most of these features are omitted or standardised in the final product. In order to do so, a parallel corpus, consisting of original and dubbed episodes (English-Spanish) of the situation comedy Friends, will be analysed.

Keywords:

• audiovisual translation
• dubbese
• dubbing
• intensifiers
• parallel corpus
• television dialogue

Notes on contributor

Rocío Baños is Practical Translation Coordinator at Imperial College London, where she teaches Audiovisual Translation and Translation Technology. She holds a PhD in Audiovisual Translation from the University of Granada, focused on spoken Spanish in dubbed and domestic situation comedies. Her main research interests lie in the fields of Translation Training, Translation Technology and Audiovisual Translation, especially in dubbing. She has published various articles in these areas, and has also edited a dossier on dubbing in Trans: Revista de Traductología (in press).

Notes

1. Orality markers are here understood as ‘features typifying spontaneous spoken register used in prefabricated dialogue to reinforce its orality and to convey a false sense of spontaneity’ (Baños, 2014).

2. According to Quaglio (2009, p. 94), adverbial intensifiers are used similarly in fictional dialogue (Friends) and in natural conversation in English, but are more frequent in the former.

3. Throughout the paper we will refer to the ‘translator’ for the sake of brevity, but it should be noted that this term also includes all the agents involved in the dubbing process (dialogue writer, dubbing director, dubbing actors, etc.), as the translator is far from being the sole person responsible for the decisions taken and reflected on the final product. To the best of the author's knowledge, and according to the information available at www.eldoblaje.com, the main agents involved in the dubbing of the episodes under study were always the same: the translation was done by Darryl Clark, David Cortés was the dialogue writer, and Santiago Cortés was the dubbing director.

4. The term dubbese, originally attributed to Myers (1973), is defined by Marzá and Chaume (2009, p. 36) as ‘a culture-specific linguistic and stylistic model for dubbed texts which has been named by some authors as a third norm, being similar, but not equal, to real oral discourse and external production oral discourse’.

5. Although the quantitative analysis is based on text files, qualitative results will take into consideration the audiovisual text as a whole, that is the final product that reaches source and target viewers and not just the dialogues.

6. More attention will be paid to isochrony than to lip synchrony in the analysis, since the latter is only relevant in close-ups and extreme close-ups (Chaume, 2008, p. 135), and these types of shots are very rare in situation comedies.