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

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

Epistemic modality in film dialogue and audiovisual translation

| University of Bologna

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.

Keywords: epistemic modality, epistemic stance, audiovisual translation, subtitling, dubbing, pragmatics, English film dialogue, Italian film dialogue
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
Published online: 19 September 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.337.08nap
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