Dubbing attitudes through tonal patterns: when tones speak louder than words

Abstract

This article explores the conveyance of attitudinal content through intonation in dubbed dialogue and presents the findings from an empirical corpus-based analysis. Research-wise, intonation is hitherto an understudied topic in Audiovisual Translation and has generally taken a back seat in dubbing literature. However, its communicative value and attitudinal function in oral discourse cannot be overlooked when interpreting and producing dubbed speech. The possibility of associating a particular tonal pattern with specific attitudes has enabled the comparison between a number of English original and Spanish dubbed intonation phrases via a speech analysis software. The results obtained provide empirical data on the dubbing of the attitudinal content under analysis and account for the main trends that could negatively affect both the quality of the final outcome and the way the dubbed text is received by the target audience.