May the Illocutionary Force Be with You: the Anaphora Rule in English-Spanish Voice-over Translation

Abstract

This paper explores the rendition possibilities of English deaccenting by anaphora rule (given information) in Spanish voice-over translation by means of a study of 9 unscripted programmes, including documentaries, reality shows and news interviews. The intonational component of source languages in translation has barely gained any attention in Audiovisual Translation (AVT), even when English prosody is immensely rich from a communicative and pragmatic perspective. In addition, we cannot expect to find a one-to-one relationship between the intonational systems of source and target languages, nor consider all parts of the source text equally relevant. For this reason, the deaccenting of old information in oral English and the pragmatic and illocutionary load that it carries need to be properly rendered in the target language, in our case Spanish, by means of the resources available in this language, which may not only be prosodic, but also syntactic and semantic.