Prefabricated orality : a challenge in audiovisual translation

Abstract

Creating fictional dialogues that sound natural and believable is one of the main challenges of both screenwriting and audiovisual translation. The challenge does not lie so much in trying to imitate spontaneous conversations, but in selecting specific features of this mode of discourse that are widely accepted and recognised as such by the audience. The main purpose of this article is to analyse and describe the linguistic code in an audiovisual corpus, focusing on what is specific to audiovisual texts and, therefore, to audiovisual translation. Although this code is common to all texts that need to be translated, it stands out further in audiovisual texts since they are “written to be spoken as if not written” (Gregory and Carroll, 1978: 42). We are therefore dealing with texts whose orality may seem spontaneous and natural, but which is actually planned or, as Chaume (2004a: 168) terms it, ‘prefabricated’. Since this is a characteristic that is common to most audiovisual fictional texts regardless of their origins, our aim here is to describe the main features of the linguistic code in native and foreign productions (dubbed from English into Spanish) and to highlight the trends when writing and translating these texts, in order to compare them at a later stage.