Subtitling Jane Austen: Pride & Prejudice by Joe Wright

This paper analyses the official English subtitles of Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice, considered as a possible source of insight into the themes of the film and the contribution of dialogues to the filmic product. The subtitles are considered as a corpus, and quantitative as well as qualitative analytical methods are applied. In particular, the following methodological steps are performed: automatic semantic tagging; extraction of key domains, an extension of the keywords concept; extraction of key POS tags, used to seek confirmation to a stylistic trend appearing in the analysis; and investigation of concordance lines. Several key domains are identified and discussed. Alongside providing empirical evidence to observation, the results show how much information can be conveyed by subtitles, and their concurrent role in the creation of the overall product. Specifically, this analysis showed that the dialogues in Joe Wright’s film version of Pride & Prejudice perform two fundamental roles: they underline interpersonal relations and family ties, and even more prominently describe society and manners. Some core themes are common to both personal and social levels of life. These are: advantage; judgment; happiness; and hope/expectations. Love pertains only to the personal sphere and is expressed as romantic love or motherly/sisterly affection. Social life is depicted in terms of social manners, social obligations, social activities, social respect, and social judgment. Furthermore, action is not a dominant element in the dialogues and, when mentioned, it is always socially oriented: dancing and playing the piano, visiting people, or talking to or about people. Finally, the concept of pride emerged among the key domains and, interestingly, it is expressed through a range of terms, including vanity, arrogance, conceit, snob, pompous, boasts, selfish, as well as pride and proud. Such lexical richness illustrates pride in its several semantic components. As an adjunct, semantic tagging highlighted that these dialogues are unusually rich in adjectives and adverbs expressing the speakers’ degree of appreciation or certainty.