Abstract:
Discourse particles make up a formally heterogeneous group of words but with a common function in discourse, that of guiding the reader in inferential process by means of their procedural meaning (Martín Zorraquino & Portolés, 1999). They are linguistic units of different nature such as adverbs (bien, bueno), adverbial locutions (sin embargo, por tanto, en segundo lugar), interjections (¿eh?) or verb forms (oye, fíjese, mira), which is why they do not represent a grammatical class of words, but a functional one (Loureda & Acín, 2010). As it has been experimentally demonstrated, these units reduce the linguistic underdeterminacy within texts and, in many cases, limit cognitive efforts (Loureda et al., 2021). However, in the translation of subtitles, essentially multimodal texts, discourse particles are often treated as superficial elements that can be omitted in the case of spatiotemporal constraints (Calvo Rigual, 2015; Hurt & Widler, 1998). This contribution presents a case study with eyetracking that makes it necessary to reconsider the role of these procedural units in the subtitling of semi-planned texts in Spanish. The eyetracking technique takes eye fixation as a parameter for measuring reading time and thus allows conclusions to be drawn about cognitive efforts associated with text processing (Krüger & Steyn, 2013; Rayner, 1998). The quantitative study reports data from 20 native speakers of Italian (with a B1 level of Spanish) who viewed a Spanish political interview subtitled in the same language in two versions, with and without the presence of discourse particles. The results show that a) not all discourse particles have the same procedural weight and b) despite often being a focus of visual attention, these units do not slow down the reading process.
