Representations of stuttering in subtitling: A view from a corpus of English language films

This chapter is aimed at analyzing the representation of stuttering in popular media, with a special focus on feature films, and in the written medium, including both literature and subtitling, which, despite their being two different communication modes, interestingly share some representational graphic conventions. Awareness of screen representation of stuttering is necessary to fully understand to what extent this speech impairment contributes to characterization, how it is re-shaped in AVT, and if a plausible and adequate scenario is re-created in the target culture. To the purpose, a corpus of films is assembled and analyzed. This offers us the opportunity not only of sampling different renditions of stuttering but also to outline an ample overview of the functions it can perform in texts, either tele-cinematic or fictional.