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ARIAS-BADIA, BLANCA. SUBTITLING TELEVISION SERIES. A

CORPUS-DRIVEN STUDY OF POLICE PROCEDURALS. OXFORD,

BERN, BERLIN, BRUXELLES, NEW YORK, WIEN, PETER LANG, 2020,

248 PP., ISBN 978-1-78707-796-6 (PRINT), ISBN 978-1-78707-

798-0 (EPUB)

The Audiovisual Translation (AVT) and Media Accessibility fields have

corresponding Spanish subtitles. Its interdisciplinary nature lies on the

combination of Film and Television Studies, Linguistics, and Translation

Studies (TS). Notably, the author explores the notion of norms and patterns

through the lens of these three disciplines, by contextualising the source and

target texts in the oral-written language continuum. The book follows a clear

structure of nine chapters including a theoretical and methodological

contextualisation of the (quantitative and qualitative) morphosyntactic and

lexical analysis of the Corpus of Police Procedurals.

Chapter 1 introduces the broader context of AVT, specifically

highlighting the existing research on «lifelike language» (p. 2) or fictive

(2008).

Chapter 2 is devoted to the notion of norms and their descriptive and

prescriptive nature within the three main disciplines mentioned above. In

Film and Television Studies, an explicit link is made apparent between

norms and genre conventions. Meanwhile, norms in Linguistics research

largely allude to the identification of patterns in language use. Within

Descriptive Translation Studies, «norms effectively take over the focus of

interest that in TS had previously been occupied by the notion of

equivalence» (p. 18). Indeed, TS scholars have continuously applied the

Corpus Linguistics methodology so as to find regularities in translation.

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particular. This is followed by a summary of the syntactic and lexical features

of subtitled text or, as Díaz-Cintas (2003, p. 280) puts it, «subtitlese». Fictive

orality in television dialogue and subtitles is characterised by a number of

features that are often opposed: lexical repetition and redundancy vs. none,

or parataxis vs. hypotaxis, as explained in this Chapter.

lemmatisation (the identification of a word’s stem) and the part-of-speech

tagging or assignment of word classes. At this stage, the author offers a first

glimpse at some linguistic characteristics shared by the original dialogue and

its subtitles (a preponderance of crime-related dialogue and jargon, a

mixture of formal and colloquial language, etc.). Moreover, Arias-Badia

ascertains that the analysed subtitles mostly adhere to professional

standards, e.g. positioning, maximum characters per line, subtitle duration,

punctuation, etc.

Chapters 5 and 6 deal with the morphosyntactic results of the corpus.

Chapter 5 showcases the quantitative morphosyntactic analysis of the

sentences in each version is similar, the differences lie in sentence length

and nominal clause occurrences, both being lower in the target texts. In

terms of subordination occurrence, Arias-Badia finds that subordinate

clauses are more frequent in the subtitles than in the original dialogue. This

is one of the results that challenges the preconception of «structural

simplicity in subtitling» (p. 121). Chapter 6 adopts a qualitative approach for

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syntactic-semantic units.

types that typify the corpus as a whole», p. 134), lexical density, vocabulary

richness, information load and terminological density. Perhaps surprisingly,

more lexical similarities than differences were found between the source and

the target text. Some exceptions – which are to be taken with caution

because of the intrinsic differences between the English and Spanish

languages (Corpas-Pastor, 2008) – were the information load (number of

lexical words/number of tokens) and the vocabulary richness (calculated by

dividing the number of unique words or types by the number of running

words or tokens). The information load is lower in the subtitles, which goes

against the «principle that written discourse has a heavier information load

than spoken dialogue» (p. 150), and the vocabulary richness is higher in the

subtitles of Dexter than in the original dialogue. This latter result is yet again

conflicting: Even though vocabulary richness is often associated with written

language (as in subtitles), the assumed subtitles’ simplicity would lead us to

results, which are in line with existing literature in our field, point to the fact

neologism) is assessed through a Corpus Pattern Analysis. This analysis

language use for creative purposes – is rare in both the source and target

texts, although anomalous collocation and metaphor prove to be the most

frequent creative devices in both the original dialogue and the subtitles.

Overall, the neutralisation effect is not as prevalent in these subtitled texts as

we might have expected.

Lastly, the author offers a concise yet complete overview of the

corpus results in Chapter 9. Arias-Badia highlights that the alleged

neutralisation effect in subtitled text does not pass the test in the Corpus of

Police Procedurals. Indeed, she finds that the series’ subtitles are «as

similar to one another as their source counterparts» (p. 214). This is an

argument not only against the existence of neutralisation in subtitling, but

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same methodology to other genres and language pairs.

book: the application of mixed methods within the field of Corpus Linguistics.

(Quantitative) Corpus Linguistics may, for instance, be combined with other

methods such as qualitative content analysis, or the quantitative corpus

results may be framed as a starting point for a reception study to be

conducted at a later stage. More generally, Meister (2018) argues that

studies combining (quantitative and qualitative) mixed methods in the

broader context of TS deserve lengthier discussions on the integration of

results. This is arguably also true for studies deploying corpus analyses.

In conclusion, this book is an invaluable piece of scholarly work in

terms of novelty, methodological soundness and comprehensive coverage.

The book is certainly to be recommended to Corpus Linguistics researchers

working in the field of TS, but also to AVT scholars, practitioners and

students, who will surely benefit from the manual-like segments discussing

the conventions of scripted dialogue and subtitles in Chapters 3 and 4.

Moreover, the clear and easy-to-follow structure of the book facilitates the

replication of similar studies that might look at other television genres or

language pairs. Lastly, if I were to add some minor criticism, the study dealt

with the multimodal nature of the subject of study rather marginally. This is

on why such results came to be.

REFERENCES

Baños, R. (2013). ‘That is so cool’: Investigating the translation of adverbial

intensifiers in English-Spanish dubbing through a parallel corpus of

sitcoms. Perspectives, 21(4), 526-542.

Baños, R. (2021). Creating credible and natural-sounding dialogs in dubbing:

can it be taught? The Interpreter and Translator Trainer, 15(1), 13-33,

doi: 10.1080/1750399X.2021.1880262

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Matamala, A. (2008). La oralidad en la ficción televisiva: análisis de las

interjecciones de un corpus de comedias de situación originales y

dobladas. In J. Brumme (Ed.), La oralidad fingida: descripción y

Meister, L. (2018). On methodology: How mixed methods research can

contribute to Translation Studies. Translation Studies, 11(1), 66-83.

doi: 10.1080/14781700.2017.1374206

Reviers, N. (2017). Audio-description in Dutch: A corpus-based study into

the linguistic features of a new, multimodal text type (Doctoral thesis).

[IRENE HERMOSA-RAMÍREZ]