Arias-Badia, B. (2020) Subtitling Television Series. A Corpus-Driven Study of Police Procedurals. Oxford: Peter Lang. 244 pp. ISBN 978-1-78707-796-6. Review

Abstract

The volume Subtitling Television Series. A Corpus-Driven Study of Police Procedurals by Dr Blanca Arias-Badia (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) reports on a study of linguistic features present in a corpus of English scripted dialogue and Spanish subtitling compiled ad hoc, the Corpus of Police Procedurals (CoPP). More specifically, this work, framed within descriptive Audiovisual Translation (AVT), focuses on quantitative and qualitative analyses of syntactical and lexical features in the original script as well as in the subtitled version of the TV series which make up the corpus: Castle, Dexter and The Mentalist. By doing so, it delves into the relevant yet underexplored area of fictive orality in subtitling through an innovative methodology in this field, the corpus-driven approach. It is a refreshing contribution which will undoubtedly be of interest for Translation Studies and Corpus Linguistics researchers.