Non-standard deaccenting in Catalan: dubbing strategies

Abstract

Non-standard deaccenting in Catalan: dubbing strategiesCatalan presents a strict pattern in terms of primary accent assignment: pitch prominence is associated with core clause final position (Vallduví 1992, 1994, 2008). Hence, unlike English (and Spanish, to a certain extent), Catalan cannot resort to accent-shift in situ to mark the focus. For instance, the sentence “I don’t HAVE the tickets” shows an accent-shift onto the verb have. In Catalan, this is not possible since the sequence “les entrades”, which follows the accented element (“tinc”), is forced to a dislocated (deaccented) position: “No les TINC, les entrades”. Therefore, deaccented material following primary accent will appear in a dislocated position. This strict isomorphism between prosody and sentence structure restricts the type of strings that may be deaccented after the primary accent. Although verbal complements and adjuncts may be deaccented (i.e., dislocated, binding the corresponding clitic in the clause when required), linguistic material inside phrases is usually non-deaccentable. This paper identifies faulty prosodic patterns in texts dubbed into Catalan mainly from English, and at the same time provides a variety of syntactic strategies to properly transfer informationally-marked structures, which might trigger such non-standard patterns, onto the Catalan target text. Awareness of both the contrasts between languages and also the resources available in the inventory of the target language will improve the quality of the final product. The data are mainly from English texts dubbed into Catalan broadcast by TV3, the Catalan National Television Corporation.

Key Words: deaccenting; dubbing; primary accent; dislocation; prosody; English-Catalan contrast