Prefabricated orality and the translation of Spanish and Catalan approximators into English in a TV series

Abstract

Discourse markers have been studied in translation studies in the variety known as prefabricated orality, present in audiovisual products in which spontaneous orality is feigned through a priori script writing. These particles are made explicit or implied when transferring from one language to another. In the present work, I delve into the translation of four discourse markers: como and com, from Spanish and Catalan, respectively, and their variants como que and com que, categorized as approximators. The corpus used is a TV series based on improvisation, so the present article challenges the adequacy of the label of prefabricated orality considering the lack of a script and the performative factor of language. The analysis is divided into the classification of the textual and pragmatic values of the markers in the source languages and their translation in the English subtitling. The results align with past studies in which the preference seems to be for the omission of markers, regardless of their contribution to the discourse, with the losses that this entails. Beyond this, it has been found that other factors, such as co-occurrence with other markers or the marker's position, seem relevant in their translation, so a syntactic analysis of translation techniques is proposed.