A Study of Cultural and Pragmatic Aspects of British and American TVSeries and of their Italian Dubbed Versions (original) (raw)

The second chapter outlines all the pragmatic and cultural aspects I took into account for my analysis. In the first part of the chapter, I make a theoretical comparison between, on the one hand, the characteristics of everyday conversational routines and, on the other, of those of telecinematic discourse, which is the basis of my dissertation. Specifically, as concerns conversational routines, I introduce the concept of vagueness and its main features, namely hedging, discourse markers, and modality, which I use as variables for my study. For each of these three topics, I provide definitions, characteristics and functions in texts. I then provide a definition of predictability and taboo language, which are the features of telecinematic discourse. The second part of the chapter is devoted to pragmatics and to cultural aspects of language. First of all, as regards pragmatics, I define the term "speech act" and describe its function, the development of its concept throughout the decades, and the distinction between perlocutionary, locutionary and illocutionary acts. I also draw a comparison between Austin's and Searle's views on this matter. Secondly, I introduce Brown and Levinson's Politeness Theory, and the concepts of positive and negative face and positive and negative politeness. As for the cultural aspects of language, I base my research on the distinction between Low Context Communication and High Context Communication orientations, focusing in particular on the languages I analysed. The third chapter is in a way a link between the theoretical and the practical part. It presents the TV series I considered for my analysis: Skins, Shameless, Broadchurch (Gracepoint in the American version) and The Thick of It (Veep in the American version). Each of them is described in terms of plot, setting, duration, and characters. I also introduce the figure of characters in TV series, describing their influence on the text and context. The fourth chapter is the first one related to the analysis of my data. After a brief introduction to corpus-based studies, I subdivide it into four parts, each of which focuses on the analysis of respectively cultural references, colloquial expressions, taboo language and discourse markers. For each section I present the results in the form of tables and graphs, and discuss the reasons for possible differences and similarities among the three versions of the same transcript and give relevant examples. The final chapter is related to the cross-sectional analysis of the speech acts I chose to consider in my research, namely offers, requests, orders, apologies, thanks, and suggestions. The data are broken down according to several variables, including clause types, such as declaratives, yes/no questions, WH-questions, exclamations, modal verbs others are errors, that is the frequency and the weight of mistakes and the reaction of the user to them, and satisfaction, i.e. whether the product satisfies the user. Related to accessibility, another term that should be mentioned is legibility, that is the complete availability of the product for any kind of audience. On the other hand, one can reach the top by improving the quality of the product by making its employment as easy as possible (readability). This last point is something that can be easily handled nowadays, but legibility is far more difficult to manage; indeed, the subtitler must pay attention both to the translation and the layout (character, size, number of lines etc.), in that subtitles are not only functional for the audiovisual product itself, but also represent a way to teach foreign languages and to decrease illiteracy. 1.2 Types of Audiovisual Translation The most popular types of Audiovisual Translation are "dubbing" and "subtitling". As Pedersen (2011:4) states, dubbing replaces the source language soundtrack with a target language soundtrack, while subtitling keeps the original soundtrack, and superimposes a translation on the visual image of the film or TV programme. Apart from them, other AVT strategies are available:  Voice-over, which is performed by a speaker that reads a script during a show on television, cinema, or a theatre; it is, usually, pre-recorded and placed at the top of the original soundtrack. It was used in the past for radio commercials that were broadcasted live, with actors, crew and an orchestra. Nowadays, it is common for TV programmes to use voice-over instead of the whole process of dubbing, because it is more demanding in terms of money and time. In these cases the audience hears the original voice at a lower volume, and the translator's voice at a higher volume.  Simultaneous subtitling, which is performed by means of speech-recognition technology. During a live show, a re-speaker listens to the live speech and repeats it (also summarise and simplify it if necessary) to a speech-recognizer that automatically creates captions. The re-speaker does not have to worry about repetitions or hesitations because the software erases them, and also about noisy is going on onto the screen, on stage or in the painting by describing them in detail in terms of colours, facial expressions, gestures etc. Unfortunately, this kind of facility is not available everywhere, that is why there are no specific criteria and rules. The important thing is to find suitable words and expressions to describe what is going on in order to make the hearer understand it completely.  Multilingual Diffusion: the option of choosing the language on a TV menu among a range of languages.  Captions: unlike subtitles, they provide further explanations that aim to let the viewer fully understand what s/he is watching. Usually written by the director, they consist of stage directions like places, dates, names, years and help clarify the context of the representation.  Displays: they consist of, for instance, letters, newspapers titles, road signs, posters that belong to the image. Usually, they are subtitled or, in the case of dubbing, an audio description is used to describe the image.  Pop-up glosses: used for Japanese anime, they are hints that pop up on the top of the screen with explanations, usually coming from the manga, that help the audience to fully understand it. (Kay, De Linde, 2009:02) 1.3 Audiovisual Translation in Europe In the AVT environment, European countries are usually divided taking into account the three main types of AVT: dubbing, voice-over and subtitling. A clear distinction between them in these terms is quite impossible to make not to mention that things work differently for cinema and television. Following the survey made by EACEA, Education,