Orality in translated and non-translated fictional dialogues

In fiction, fictional dialogues are created with the purpose of character building, plot development, and reader appeal (Locher and Jucker 2021). To achieve these purposes, the orality features present in fictional dialogues are designed to mimic authentic conversations, which also poses great challenges for translation. Previous studies have investigated how orality features are translated in fictional dialogues. There is, however, a lack of quantitative analysis of representative orality features in existing studies of orality in fictional dialogues. The objective of this study is to fill the research gap by comparing orality in translated and non-translated fictional dialogues using a comparable corpus design. To ensure a robust comparison of the two text types, we made use of the linguistic features of dimension 1 in multidimensional analysis approach (Biber 1988) together with the dimension score of the two text types. It was found that both text types display an orality tendency toward the interactive texts, but the dimension score for non-translated fictional dialogues was higher than that for translated dialogues, and 11 out of the 28 linguistic features were more frequently used in non-translated fictional dialogues. The study further explores possible explanations for the different profiling between translated and non-translated fictional dialogues.