A standard case of subtitling. : A comparative analysis of the subtitling of Scrubs and House M.D. with a focus on medical terminology.

Abstract: Toury’s first law of translation states that translation of all kinds entails standardisation and, moreover, that the more peripheral the status of a text is, the more standardised its translation will be. As such, the purpose of this essay was to investigate to what extent this holds true in the Swedish translations of the two US television hospital shows Scrubs and House M.D. Though they are both hospital shows, House M.D. – considering its unprecedented genre hybridity and unusual plot structure – is a less mainstream and, as such, more peripheral example of a hospital show than Scrubs, which is more mainstream and, consequently, has a more central position within this genre. The object of study concerned the genre-specific register shared by the two shows – i.e. the medical terminology – which was extracted together with its Swedish subtitles and analysed, mainly in terms of coupled pairs. The analysis consisted of identifying which translation strategies had been adopted in the transfer of terminology and, moreover, what these strategies had entailed in terms of semantic increase, decrease, or correspondence between the original texts and their translations. From this it was concluded that both texts were indeed standardised and, additionally, that House M.D. – as the more peripheral of the two texts – had undergone a more extensive standardisation than Scrubs – being the text holding a more central status.