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In:Pragmatics and Translation
Edited by Miriam A. Locher, Daria Dayter and Thomas C. Messerli
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 337] 2023
► pp. 173–194

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Chapter 8
“There is no doubt, you must be right!”

Epistemic modality in film dialogue and audiovisual translation

 | University of Bologna
Published online: 19 September 2023
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.337.08nap
Abstract
This contribution shows how epistemic modality expressed by characters in English films is conveyed into Italian dubbed and subtitled dialogues. The aim of the research is twofold: (a) revealing whether Italian norms governing epistemic modality differ from English norms and, secondly, (b) revealing whether epistemic modal markers in the source dialogues undergo modifications in translation for dubbing and for subtitling, two constrained audiovisual translation modes. Utterances containing epistemic modal markers were collected from six films to form three corpora: one for English original films, one for their dubbed counterparts and one for their subtitled counterparts. The study revealed that differences exist both in the expression of epistemic modality in the two language systems and between dubbed and subtitled dialogues.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
    • 2.1Epistemic modality
    • 2.2Evidentiality
    • 2.3Audiovisual translation and epistemic modality
  • 3.Methods
    • 3.1Data collection
    • 3.2Data annotation
  • 4.Results and discussion
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
  • Filmography
References (71)
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Filmography
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