Shift of Oral and Written Language Features in Audio-visual Translation: A Case study of Subtitling and dubbing of the American TV show ‘Prison Break’

Abstract

This study investigates the use of spoken and written linguistic features in audiovisual translation. This kind of translation, also called screen translation, is different from classical types of translation, such as literary translation, technical translation and legal translation, in that the source text is spoken. This oral text can be transferred into a written text, the case of subtitling, or into an oral target text, the case of dubbing. Thus, in order to investigate the characteristics of spoken and written language in audio-visual translation, I have conducted a quantitative comparison between a dubbed and a subtitled version of an American TV Show. I have focused in