Reduction in the Spanish subtitling of How I Met Your Mother

Abstract

This article presents a brief analysis of the reduction in the Spanish subtitling for the sitcom How I Met Your Mother. The elimination of fragments in translation to adjust the subtitle to technical constraints is mainly seen in what I call discourse particles. In a corpus composed of ten episodes of the series, I identified the most common discourse particles, their functions and the degree to which they are or not, affected, by reduction, in order to outline, through pragmatic criteria, the decisions made in translation when part of the original message must be eliminated.