The Prosody Of Dubbed Speech

This book offers a descriptive and practical analysis of prosody in dubbed speech, examining the most distinctive traits that typify dubbed dialogue at the prosodic level. The author's unique perspective - as both a translation studies researcher and a voice-over professional - helps to bring these two aspects of the dubbing process together into a coherent study for the first time. Supported by corpus analysis of English and Spanish episodes of US TV show How I Met Your Mother, she examines aspects of prosody in source and target languages, including features such as intonation, loudness, tempo, rhythm and tension. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of translation and interpreting, media studies, television and film production, as well as dubbing professionals.

Despite a long tradition of scholarship and the vast amount of dubbed audiovisual products available on the global market, dubbing is still relatively underrepresented in audiovisual research. The aim of this volume is to give dubbing research its due by showing that, far from being a doomed or somewhat declining form of AVT, it is being exploited globally in the most diverse and fruitful ways. The contributions to this collection take up the diverse strands that make up the field, to offer a multi-faceted assessment of dubbing on the move, embracing its important historical past as well as present and future developments, thus proving that dubbing has really come a long way and has not been less ready than other AVT modes to respond to the mood of the times. The volume will be of interest for scholars and students of translation studies, audiovisual translation, linguistics, film, television and game studies.

This book describes the dubbing process of English-language animated films produced by US companies in the 21st century, exploring how linguistic variation and multilingualism are used to create characters and identities and examining how Italian dubbing professionals deal with this linguistic characterisation. The analysis carried out relies on a diverse range of research tools: text analysis, corpus study and personal communications with dubbing practitioners. The book describes the dubbing workflow and dubbing strategies in Italy and seeks to identify recurrent patterns and therefore norms, as well as stereotypes or creativity in the way multilingualism and linguistic variation are tackled. It will be of interest to students and scholars of translation, linguistic variation, film and media.

This book analyses an important phase in the interlingual dubbing process of audiovisual productions: the elaboration of target language scripts for the recording studios. Written by a practitioner in the industry who is also an academic and trainer, it provides practical know-how and guidelines while adopting a scholarly, structural and methodical approach. Supported by an exemplified, analytical and theoretical framework, it is non-language specific and discusses strategies and tricks of the trade. Divided into three parts, the book provides a descriptive, practical and analytical approach to dubbing and dialogue writing. The author analyses scripts drawn from her own professional practice, including initial drafts that illustrate the various transformations of a text throughout the rewriting process. She also offers a ‘backstage’ perspective, from first-hand experience in recording sessions that enabled knowledge of text manipulation, studio jargon, and the dubbing post production process. This publication will provide a valuable resource for novice dubbing translators and dialogue writers, while offering practitioner insights to scholars and researchers in the field of Audiovisual Translation, Film and Media Studies.

A unique and balanced combination of translation and interpreting studies, edited and written by leading voices in the fields In Introduction to Translation and Interpreting Studies, accomplished scholars Aline Ferreira and John W. Schwieter have brought together a detailed and comprehensive introductory-level textbook covering the essential aspects of translation and interpreting studies. Through chapters authored by leading voices in the field, this book covers topics of theoretical and conceptual relevance—such as the history of the development of the field and methods for understanding gender, society, and culture as aspects of the role of the interpreter—as well as critical topics in the application of theory to real world practice. Beginning with an authoritative treatment of the theoretical developments that have defined the field since the early 1970s, this textbook first describes the influential work of such figures as Jakobson, Holmes, and Toury, thus ensuring students develop a thorough understanding of the history and theoretical underpinnings of the fields of translation and interpreting studies. The text then begins to introduce grounded discussions of interpreting in specialized fields such as legal and healthcare interpreting and sign language translation. Learning is reinforced throughout the text through pedagogical features including reflection questions, highlighted key words, further readings, and chapter objectives. Instructors will also have access to companion website with PowerPoint slides and multiple-choice questions to support classroom application. Truly a unique work in translation and interpreting studies, this essential new textbook offers: A thorough introduction to the fields of translation and interpreting with discussion of applications to interdisciplinary topics Explorations of translation machines and technology, including their history and recent trends Practical discussions of culture, gender, and society in the context of translation and interpreting studies, as well as training and pedagogical issues in translation and interpreting A concise examination of translation process research and methods, including the mental processes and actions that people take while translating Complementary web materials including PowerPoint slides and practice questions Ideal for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in programs in such as linguistics, language studies, and communications, or for those who plan to work in translation and/or interpreting, Introduction to Translation and Interpreting Studies will earn a place in the libraries of anyone interested in a reader-friendly translation and interpreting resource.

The aim of this book is to contribute to the dissemination of current research carried out by young scholars who are starting to build promising careers in the field of audiovisual translation. Although it is by no means an exhaustive collection of state-of-the-art approaches to AVT, this publication offers a carefully chosen list of research perspectives that are worth exploring in the current technologised landscape that this area of translation has become. Therefore, it represents a select yet judicious group of studies, with the added strength that the contributions presented here are not limited to academic circles, but rather offer different points of view from various angles, given the diverse profiles that characterizes the authors. Thus, each chapter deals with the subject of AVT from an academic, educational or professional perspective. As diverse as their approaches are, all the young authors who have collaborated to create this volume offer enriching perspectives that reflect the potential that AVT still has today and the prospective studies that are worth undertaking to continue enriching the field of AVT.

This book is a thorough quantitative and qualitative study of a typical phenomenon pertaining to the English spoken language; namely question tags (QTs) and invariant tags. More specifically, English tags are analysed on the syntactic, pragmatic and prosodic level, taking into account cross-varietal differences as well as both visual and auditory dimensions, in order to get a more precise interpretation of their communicative functions. This is made possible by examining film language, since films, being complex semiotic “texts”, provide a more complete set of parameters for analysis, especially in the case of QTs, where intonation is crucial for their interpretation. The study of their function is based not only on their formal properties, but is integrated with the use of spectrograms, which makes it possible to actually “visualise” the prosody of tags and to back up the results with material evidence. Moreover, tags are also examined from a translational perspective, with analysis focusing on the transposition of tags in Italian dubbing, a specific type of audiovisual translation, for two main reasons: firstly, to check how and to what extent tags are rendered in Italian, a language which does not have so structured a set of equivalent expressions, and secondly, to see how much space they are granted in a typically “constrained” translation like dubbing, which is severely influenced by the visual dimension. After this, the use of the various translating options in Italian dubbing is studied in Italian original film language and compared with spontaneous conversation in both languages, by analysing data in corpora of spontaneous speech both in English and Italian to ascertain whether the use of tags and their Italian counterparts in film language is natural or artificial. The present work is the first to study the syntactic and prosodic properties of English tags from an integrated pragmatic and translational perspective. The study also qualifies as contrastive in that the use of these conversational routines is analysed in two different languages (English and Italian), as well as in different genres and varieties, including film language, dubbese and spontaneous speech.

Top researchers in prosody and psycholinguistics present their research and their views on the role of prosody in processing speech and also its role in reading. The volume characterizes the state of the art in an important area of psycholinguistics. How are general constraints on prosody (‘timing’) and intonation (‘melody’) used to constrain the parsing and interpretation of spoken language? How are they used to assign a default prosody/intonation in silent reading, and more generally what is the role of phonology in reading? Prosody and intonation interact with phonology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics and thus are at the very core of language processes.