Inserts in modern script-writing and their translation into Spanish

In this paper we study the translation of six types of inserts (Biber et al. 1999: 1082ff); namely peripheral elements to the clause structure, traditionally regarded as secondary in descriptive grammars and which have received the attention of corpus linguists in recent years. Interjections, greetings and farewells, attention signals, hesitators, polite formulae, and discourse markers will be covered. After a short introduction on the relevance of these elements within spoken English, we proceed to analyze the translational strategies used in the Spanish versions of the British films ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’, ‘Bridget Jones’ Diary’ and ‘Notting Hill’ selected for the study because of the contemporary texture of their scripts, which attempt to imitate the spoken mode in its informal variety. In a final section, we make some concluding remarks about the findings.