ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on structural and expressive aspects of conversation. It examines how expressive and orality markers are rendered in subtitling. The chapter discusses the main features of spoken discourse and conversational interaction in audiovisual dialogue and translation. Studies on subtitling unanimously point out that some conversational features are eliminated from subtitles because this modality of audiovisual translation involves a transfer from oral to written discourse—which, in turn, entails the need for a significant amount of text reduction. The structural elements of conversation, mainly turn-taking rules, are sometimes manipulated in subtitles to follow the rules of written rather than spoken language. Manipulative behaviour in subtitling can also result in the cleaning up of expressive markers of various types. In dubbing many expressive and orality markers are deleted, although for different reasons from the ones at play in subtitling. The number of expressive and orality markers is reduced in both subtitling and dubbing, although in distinct ways and for different reasons.
