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‘That is so cool’: investigating the translation of adverbial intensifiers in English-Spanish dubbing through a parallel corpus of sitcoms

Although fictional dialogue differs notably from spontaneous conversation, scriptwriters use linguistic features that are typical of naturally-occurring conversation to achieve realistic dialogues. In the case of sitcoms, the type of discourse being mirrored is colloquial conversation, which is characterised by the use of emphatic language. Intensifiers are one of the many linguistic features associated with emotionally-loaded language in colloquial conversation in English and in Spanish. Research has also shown that adverbial intensifiers (such as ‘very’, ‘so’, ‘really’, ‘totally’, ‘pretty’, etc.) are also common in fictional dialogue, specifically in the TV series Friends. Taking into consideration the prevalence of adverbial intensifiers in Friends and the role they play in fictional dialogue, this paper sets out to explore how they have been dubbed into Spanish. The aim is to delve into the characteristics of Spanish dubbed dialogue and to find out if the translator resorts to features that are typical of spontaneous conversation in Spanish to convey intensification, or if most of these features are omitted or standardised in the final product. In order to do so, a parallel corpus, consisting of original and dubbed episodes (English-Spanish) of the situation comedy Friends, will be analysed.