"It's not what they said; it's how they said it". A corpus-based study on the translation of intonation for dubbing

The present paper examines the intonation used by characters in fictional dialogue from the viewpoint of its translation for dubbing. To this purpose, it is first necessary to ascertain how much information is transmitted in the source text by means of intonation. Then, an empirical research is carried out so as to determine how, and if, the underlying meaning attached to the tonal patterns of the original characters might be successfully reflected in the translated version. This study is based on the comparative analysis of a parallel corpus comprising instances from a popular American TV series and its Spanish dubbed version. The data yielded suggest that, to the detriment of the viewers, the translated version is often depleted of the connotative richness transmitted through intonation in the original dialogues.