ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the issue of (in)directness in film subtitling contrastively (English and Spanish). Following Searle’s taxonomy (1979), the analysis is based on the directive speech acts found in the film scripts and subtitles of 24 contemporary comedy films, 12 in English (1975–2013) and 12 in Spanish (1988–2009). In order to ascertain contrastively how (in)directness is conveyed in both languages, a linguistic analysis was carried out based on an adaptation of Blum Kulka and colleagues’ taxonomy (1989) on the level of (in)directness of speech acts. The findings shed light on two different areas: 1) from a linguistic perspective, the findings contribute to our understanding of the extent to which directness and indirectness are more widely represented in English or in Spanish; and 2) from a translation perspective, the methodology shows how translating patterns in the creation of subtitles may be identified.
