Shift of Oral and Written Discourse Features in Audio-visual Translation A Corpus-Based Study

Abstract

This study investigates the use of spoken and written discourse features in audio-visual translation. To investigate the characteristics of spoken and written language features in audio-visual translation, I have conducted a quantitative comparison between a dubbed and a subtitled version of an American TV Show. I adopted Bibber’s (2004) Dimension 1: involved vs. informational production. According to this dimension, we distinguish between positive and negative features. The high frequency of the first group characterizes involved registers. Whereas, the high frequency of the second group typifies informational registers,. In this case study, it can be concluded that positive features, namely first- and second person pronouns, private verbs and present -tense are more frequent than the negative features in the three samples. Thus, the register used in the three samples of our data is highly involved. But when comparing between the three versions, we see that the dubbed language is more involved than the subtitled language. Similarly, when comparing the degree of “informationality” in the three samples, we can see that the subtitled language is more informational than the original and dubbed languages.

Keywords

• screen translation; discourse analysis; oral and written language