British TV Series Research Articles

A Study of Humorous Subtitle Translation of the Big Bang Theory From the Perspective of the Translation Variation Theory

Under the background of economic globalization, British and American movies and TV series have become one of the important ways of cultural exchange and communication between China and the west, and subtitle translation also plays an increasingly important role in cross-cultural communication. Taking the American sitcom "the Big Bang Theory" as an example, its language is characterized by humor and personality. This paper first summarizes the characteristics of subtitle translation of sitcoms, then analyzes the types of humor translation from three aspects: general humor, cultural humor and linguistic humor, and then analyzes the specific examples of "addition, subtraction, compilation and modification" to investigate the guiding role of translation variation theory in subtitle translation.

The Representation of the Anglo-American Cultural Conflict under George VI: Downton Abbey and Hyde Park on Hudson

The paper focuses on two cinematic productions set in the 1920s and 1930s: an episode of the British TV series Downton Abbey and the British comedy-drama Hyde Park on Hudson. Both works focus on a juxtaposition of the British and the Americans, playing with similar stereotypes which gained popularity a century earlier. The paper analyzes both productions, comparing them to the discourse of nineteenth-century travel writing about the USA, which, arguably, is a genre best depicting Anglo-American preconceptions of the time. Despite using elements of the same language both films seem to favor different sides of the Transatlantic conflict. The paper argues, however, that while Hyde Park presents Americans as the victors in the cultural rivalry, Downton’s message is less unequivocal.

„Child be Strange!“ – Adolescent folk horror as counter heritage in British TV series of the 1970s

In den Jahren zwischen 1969 und 1979 kommt es im britischen Fernsehen zu einer erstaunlichen Konjunktur von folk horror-Produktionen, die sich gezielt an ein jugendliches Publikum richten. Zahlreiche Serien und Fernsehfilme prägten darin mit ihrer ungewöhnlich progressiven Inszenierung, ihrer experimentellen audiovisuellen Gestaltung und ihren komplexen, nicht selten politischen Narrativen nicht nur die Entwicklung des folk horrors entscheidend, sondern auch die britische Fernsehlandschaft der Zeit. Am Beispiel der stilprägenden „unholy trinity“ des jugendlichen Folk Horror, den Serien The Owl Service (1969–70), Children of the Stones (1977) und dem Fernsehfilm Penda’s Fen (1974) untersucht dieser Artikel den aussergewöhnlichen Boom jugendorientierten folk horrors im britischen Fernsehen der 1970er-Jahre. Er vertritt dabei zum einen die These, dass diese Konjunktur das Ergebnis eines Zusammentreffens von gesellschaftlichen, populärkulturellen und rundfunkpolitischen Entwicklungen war, wie es im Grossbritannien der Zeit einzigartig war. Zum anderen arbeitet der Artikel das transgressive Potential des folk horrors heraus. Mit seinen charakteristischen subversiven Lesarten nationalen Erbes und nationaler Geschichte etablierte der folk horror in diesen Jahren eine alternative Erinnerungskultur, die sich in ihrer Progressivität und Diversität als sehr attraktiv – nicht nur – für ein jugendliches Publikum erwies.

"I thought this was Shakespeare": Romeo & Juliet: The Musical and Teenage Sexual Liberation in Netflix's Sex Education

Abstract: An increasing number of contemporary Shakespearean adaptations exploit the transformative possibilities of performance to address social injustice and inequality from different perspectives and towards new directions. A timely response to the challenge of finding alternatives to target current social concerns comes from Sex Education , a British TV series created by Laurie Nunn for Netflix in 2019. This series’ engagement with Shakespeare fosters a radical and wide-ranging critique of reactionism and a fight for change in terms of teenage sexual liberation, freedom of self-expression, inclusivity, and representation of queerness and gender fluidity. In the finale of season two, a long sequence is devoted to Romeo & Juliet: The Musical , an erotic and galactic musical version of Shakespeare’s tragedy, created by a young eccentric writer of science fiction attending the school. By also taking into consideration both the production context and Netflix’s status as a streaming platform, this article explores how this parodic postmodern version of Romeo and Juliet —informed by references to queer pop culture and to contemporary movements for civil rights—becomes the ultimate realization of Sex Education ’s rallying cry against the regimes of the “normal,” through the words of a Shakespearean play that opens up possibilities of resistance for teenagers which go beyond distinctions between heteronormative and queer.

Reframing the Dowager: Nostalgia in Downton Abbey

The popular and immensely successful British TV-series Downton Abbey (2010–2015) has been interpreted alternately as an escapist fantasy or as a retrogressive text which performs the ideological work of conservatism. But the appeal of Downton Abbey stems rather from its treatment of social change than its alleged escapism. Such reading suggests itself especially when it comes to Violet Crawley, the Dowager Countess of Grantham. An analysis of the verbal behavior of this TV character shows that the dowager countess constructs new meaning on both the textual and extratextual level by reframing. In presenting alternative ways of thinking and acting to both viewers and the other characters on the show, the dowager countess is the voice of reflective nostalgia in Downton Abbey. This makes Violet Crawley a subversive character who denounces what the series pretends to romanticize.

Medical Storyworlds: Health, Illness, and Bodies in Russian and European Literature at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Medical Storyworlds: Health, Illness, and Bodies in Russian and European Literature at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Could Fleabag be a Parisienne? Camille Cottin’s Star Image and a New French Femininity

This article discusses Camille Cottin’s star image, considering more specifically what was at stake in her 2019 performance in Mouche, the French remake of British tragicomedy TV series Fleabag created by Phoebe Waller-Bridge. The framework of this remake and the transposition of Cottin in the character played by Waller-Bridge offers a discussion on the representation of female sexuality and gender through the main character of Mouche and Fleabag. It argues that the nexus of Cottin’s gendered stardom both meets and transgresses the ideals of the cinematic type of the Parisienne, which may lead to think that Cottin was the perfect fit to be the French version of Fleabag. However, as Mouche, her persona gestures toward the projection of a female subjectivity that escapes inscription into the French cultural imagination and social practices. Drawing from theories of the abject and the female grotesque as a subversive strategy to challenge gendered expectations in Fleabag, this article sheds light on how effectively this is transposed to Cottin’s version of the character. It also considers how the strategy of breaking the fourth wall, which creates a personalised connection with the character of Fleabag, mimics the personalised and intimate connection to celebrities that social media now offers. The article suggests that Cottin’s on-screen persona competes with her star image, threatening to eradicate the space of spectatorial jouissance necessary for the processes of cinematic identification and intimate connection.

Strategies Subtitlers Use in Rendering English Slang Expressions Into Arabic

Film translation has become a worldwide field in which subtitlers translate and transfer language and style from one culture into another. Subtitling has always been affected by cultural elements. The purpose of this study was to find out how professional subtitlers differ from fansubbers when dealing with such expressions concerning the strategies that both groups use to subtitle these expressions. To achieve the goals of this study, the researchers identified 120 slang expressions from two American movies, Goodfellas and Training Day, but chose only 30 slang expressions to report on how they were rendered by both groups. Results of the study showed that the professional subtitler and the fansubbers faced many challenges and used varying strategies when subtitling slang expressions. The challenges were related to the presence of some cultural terms and different types of slangs which are unfamiliar to most subtitlers. The most frequent strategies used by the professional subtitler and fansubbers were paraphrase, euphemism, omission, and calque. The study recommends that further studies be conducted on a larger sample of slang expressions in American or British movies and TV series. In addition, the subtitling of these slang expressions can be investigated in other target cultures and languages such as Spanish, Persian, Turkish, Greek, and Kurdish.

Black Mirror, Enhancement and the Impossibility of Forgetting

Modern cognitive and experimental science is increasingly working to explore the meaning and importance of forgetting. Forgetting is one of the most important mental functions on an individual level, but also on a social and national level, since it enables healing, purifies the mind of difficult memories, prevents obsession with problems, and eliminates the possibility of psychosomatic illnesses. The famous British TV series Black Mirror, which has become a symbol of the challenges that modern and futuristic technology brings to man, deals with the problems that arise due to the obsession of the gadget culture with abolishing forgetting through technological enhancement. Several episodes are based on gadgets that expand the potential of memory and make it constantly available to other subjects, in the way that data from a person’s entire history become available. In a dialogue with Brooker’s ideas, the author re–examines the problems spawned by this future society without forgetting, and searches for possible solutions.

Ethical Existentials of Modern Screen Culture (On the Example of the British TV Series “Black Mirror”)

Ethical Existentials of Modern Screen Culture (On the Example of the British TV Series “Black Mirror”)

Dark Corporeality: Blood, Vampires and Erotics in the British TV Series “Dracula” 2020. Part 1.

The article analyzes the plot tropes of the British mini-series “Dracula”, produced by screenwriters S. Moffat and M. Gatiss, creators of the even more popular TV series “Sherlock”. The new “Dracula”, a mixture of black comedy and body horror, was produced by the BBC and shown on the streaming platform NETFLIX in 2020. The mini-series received the most controversial appraisals from viewers and art critics: from very enthusiastic to sharply negative. The author of this article examines the plot of the series “Dracula” and offers her own version of decoding its meanings. The article sequentially examines the artistic techniques used by famous British screenwriters to create visual and emotional effects, such as black humor, hypertext, queerbaiting, sexual seduction, the “defeated expectancy” trop etc.

Time Travel, Audiovisual Narratives and TV Fiction: The Bootstrap Paradox in BBC’s Doctor Who

The purpose of this work is to explore the narrative mechanisms that operate in audiovisual stories about time travel, and more specifically in those that address the so-called onthological paradox (also known as bootstrap paradox or causal loop), taking as a case study the British BBC TV series Doctor Who (1963-2020), and especially its modern era, which began in 2005.Onthological paradoxes (those where an infinite cause-effect loop is created, and therefore it is impossible to establish a point of origin of certain events) break, by their own conception, the classical structure of the story by denying the classical notion of ‘ first plot point’. Thus, many of these narratives are forced to seek alternative formulas of temporal architecture based on simultaneity, order distortion or circularity. All these solutions can be traced in many chapters of Doctor Who, particularly in those that fall under the creative direction of Steven Moffat, who in his period as screenwriter (2005-2010) and showrunner (2010-2017) used the concept of ‘time ‘as the main driving force behind his narratives.

Toward a dataist future: tracing Scandinavian posthumanism in Real Humans

Artificial intelligence is likely to undermine the anthropocentrism of humanism, the master narrative that undergirds the modern world. Humanity will need a new story to structure our beliefs and cooperation around. As different regions explore posthumanist alternatives through fiction, they bring with them distinct traditions of thought. The Swedish TV series Real Humans (2012–2014) and its British remake, Humans (2015–2018), dramatize the challenge of freeing oneself from cultural presumptions. When negotiating personhood with humanoid robots, the Swedish protagonist family presupposes a social-democratic ethos, which is a trace of Scandinavian humanism that carries into the family’s posthumanist beliefs. Using Heideggerian and related perspectives, I analyze these series to make a case for a dataist ontology with potential to re-enchant the modern world and bring forth a new epoch of being. Such a master narrative of algorithmic universality could be facilitated by a new level of interconnectedness made possible by AI. This ontology fulfills the requirements of Robbins and Horta (Introduction, Cosmopolitanisms. New York University Press, New York, pp 1–17, 2017) who call for a cosmopolitanism of inclusivity with room for overlapping conceptions to remedy our present era’s international dysfunction. The Swedish and British TV series suggest that even if humanity’s uniting around a dataist master narrative were to be driven by intercultural competition, the decisive choice might be out of human hands. Paradoxically, such disempowering in terms of agency is portrayed as necessary for human re-enchantment.

The Flouting of Conversational Maxims by Male and Female Characters in the British TV Series <em>Broadchurch</em>

This research focuses on examining the flouting of the Gricean conversational maxims on the British TV series Broadchurch. It also investigates the use of rhetorical strategies in flouting the maxims by male and female characters in the series. The research data were the utterances that flout the maxims. The data were collected from Season I of the Series, containing 8 episodes. The data were analyzed by applying Grice’s theory of cooperative principle (1975). Moreover, the data were also analyzed in terms of the rhetorical strategies employed by the characters when they flout the maxims. The results show that 97 cases of maxim flouting were found. The characters most frequently flout the maxim of relation (44.33%) and least frequently the maxim of quality (13.40%). Furthermore, in flouting the maxims, male characters tend to use the irrelevant statements as their preferred rhetorical strategy (63.46%), whereas female characters tend to use obscure expressions as their preferred rhetorical strategy (33.33%).

Comparative analysis of the broadcaster’s Twitter strategies of the highest-rated British and Spanish TV series

The current interrelation between social media and the audio-visual industry has required traditional broadcasters to extend their programming strategies outside the box. TV fiction is a suitable genre to test new forms of audience loyalty, which is essential in a highly competitive environment. In this article, we present results regarding the actions of the industry through a content analysis of the official Twitter profiles of the most-watched series in Spain and the United Kingdom. We conclude that both market strategies revolve around the linear broadcast. However, Spanish channels are more aggressive in their actions to stimulate social conversation.

Gender in British media: homosexuality and masculinity in selected TV series

The interaction between masculinity and homosexuality is of interest when considering Connell’s structure of gender power relations. Here gay men are considered subordinate to heterosexual ones, thus linking them to femininity. To fight the attributions of femininity, gay men have adopted a wide range of strategies all centred around hyper-masculinity and adherence to upper social classes, which carry the promise of power. The role of media is pivotal in shaping this imagery. It is our aim to analyse two British TV series portraying gay characters in order to uncover the identities, which may shape the perception of viewers. Furthermore, the two series are compared in regard to three aspects: hedonism, effeminacy and promiscuity. The methodology draws from Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory and the feminist film of Laura Mulvey. Due to the constricted nature of TV series, it also includes theory of Marcel Danesi. The outcomes suggest that there is a shift in the portrayal of gay masculinities towards greater conservativism. The comparison also uncovered that promiscuity is still portrayed as widely accepted in the gay community, whereas positions of effeminacy and hedonism have changed. It must be pointed out that such portrayal may be motivated by the presence of the series within heteronormative mainstream media.Keywords: homosexuality, media, television, masculinity, hegemony, men.

Midsomer Murders AKA L’ispettore Barnaby: How did it find its way into the Italian market and why was it successful?

This article looks at the process of national mediation of the British TV series Midsomer Murders (1997–present), which has been broadcast on Italian television since 2003 under the title L’ispettore Barnaby. The programme has enjoyed considerable popularity in Italy since its early days and it is still broadcast regularly. The programme was deemed to be an interesting case study in investigating national mediation as it is strongly characterized by what one might call ‘Englishness’. The article first delineates the ways in which Italian broadcasters placed the product within the Italian market, and subsequently explains why it might have been successful.

A corpus analysis on the language on TV series

The purpose of the present study is to find out the extent to which the real spoken language is reflected in TV series in terms of vocabulary. In accordance with this purpose, a corpus was compiled using scripts from two British TV series, and it was compared with the spoken part of the British National Corpus in order to find out whether there is a relationship between two corpora. The results showed that the TV series corpus covered the 98.54% of the most frequent lemmas in the spoken part of the British National Corpus, so the language used in TV series reflects the language spoken in the real life in terms of the vocabulary items and their frequency. Accordingly, it can be claimed that TV series can be used as effective in-class and extra-curricular materials for teaching vocabulary and speaking and listening skills. Â Â

Un enfoque multimétodo en los estudios de comunicación. La autoetnografía, las entrevistas cualitativas y la netnografía

This article developed a multi-methods approach in the particular branch of Communication Studies (fandom studies) to understand the transcultural fans' engagement. It has creatively deployed three research methods to unpack the Chinese fans of a British TV series- Sherlock. Research methods of autoethnography, netnography and qualitative interviews have been largely employed to test the loyalty of the author as an acafan, Chinese fans' online activity and fans' self-disclosure as a self-claimed fan. The multi-methods worked effectively to help draw the conclusion that the self-claimed fans were not fans as what the existing literature has defined. The creative combination of three methods greatly facilitated the future research of fan studies to identify fans as a focal point of the research. Este artículo expone un enfoque multi-método en la rama específica de los estudios de comunicación sobre el fenómeno fandom para entender el engagement con fans transculturales. Así, se han desarrollado tres métodos de investigación para analizar a los fans chinos de la serie de televisión británica Sherlock. La autoetnografía, la netnografía y la entrevistas cualitativas se han empleado en gran medida para probar la lealtad del autor como acafán (un académico que también es fan), la actividad online de los fans chinos y la actividad divulgadora de los que se autoproclaman como fans. Estos distintos métodos nos permiten llegar a la conclusión de que un porcentaje significativo de los que se autoproclaman fan, no lo hacen en el sentido estricto utilizado por la literatura existente. La combinación de los tres métodos facilita enormemente las futuras investigaciones sobre los fans, ubicándolos en el punto central de la investigación.

Fat Girl’s Wet Dream: Girl Sexuality, Fatness, and Mental Disability in My Mad Fat Diary

ABSTRACT This article examines alternative narratives of fat girlhood, disabled girlhood, and fat identity through the lens of sexuality and embodiment to show the complexities of young female fatness as depicted in the British TV series My Mad Fat Diary (E4 2013–2015). We argue that the series is unique in its representation of fat girlhood because it emphasizes the main character’s subjectivity and agency by allowing her to have sexual desires, fantasies, and experiences that are not demonized or ridiculed. Fatness, mental illness, girlhood, and sexual desire are depicted as equally important and inseparable aspects of the main character’s identity, so the series lends itself to an intersectional analysis employing fat studies, disability studies, and girlhood studies. By focusing on identities that are understood as transitory or impermanent (girl, fat, mentally ill), the article questions the very idea of fixed identity categories. Crucially, the series rejects the notion of fixing the aspects of protagonist’s identity normatively understood as problems (fatness, madness, sexual inexperience) through heterosexual epiphany or any other normative cure.