The nature of fixed language in the subtitling of a documentary film

8. Conclusion 
This piece of research examined the language used in AVT, specifically set phrases, 
within the subtitled and voiced-
over versions of the documentary film “The Real Da 
Vinci Code”. The basic premise for the choice of this topic was the social and cultural 
role that AVT plays in a country such as Portugal with such a large tradition in 
subtitling, though also making occasional use of dubbing and voice-over. 
The theoretical framework enabled us to insert this research within the 
descriptive TS paradigm and the norm-oriented perspective, within the AVT 
polysystem, namely interlingual subtitling and the Portuguese context. At the same 
time, we focused on the field of AVT, especially the difference between subtitling and 
revoicing (dubbing and voice-over), their advantages and disadvantages and the 
translation strategies they typically embody (either domestication or foreignization), as 
well as the importance of understanding the issue of audiovisual genres and their text 
types. 

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Moreover, we dealt with the question of word combinations, distinguishing 
between free and restricted lexical co-occurrence and exploring further the concepts and 
numerous definitions of both collocations and idiomatic expressions according to the 
perspective of a number of authors in the field of Lexicogrpahy and Phraseology. 
The research methodology introduced our study into the field of case study to be 
complemented, further on, with corpus studies. Our pilot study was presented within 
this context, explaining the background in which our material was obtained and its main 
characteristics, and clarifying the research questions and the hypotheses it allowed us to 
design. Afterwards, some examples in English and in Portuguese were taken from the 
documentary film and analyzed under the perspective of classifying them as 
collocations or idiomatic expressions and of contrasting the English original with the 
Portuguese translations, weighing also the significance that events on screen might have 
on the ultimate effect on viewers. 
Our discussion enabled us to conclude that set phrases are extremely common in 
audiovisual texts, as well as in general language, represented by our prototypical case, a 
documentary film done on the best-selling book by Dan Brown. Apart from this, it was 
also possible to confirm that most set phrases were maintained with almost 
“perfect” or 
close equivalents in Portuguese, whereas others were either mistranslated or ignored and 
omitted, due to the constraints imposed by the language itself or by subtitling. 
Moreover, it was also possible to conclude that all of the given examples were 
strengthened by what was going on in the image, in terms of the action, the setting or 
details, thus taking advantage of the richness of an audiovisual text to support the effect 
of the set phrase in question. 
Nonetheless, this minor dissertation has allowed us to be aware of the amount of 
work still to be done, namely in further developing the issue of frozenness and 
idiomaticity, since we still feel the need to clarify these concepts and design 
idiomaticity scales and reliable tests to verify if they are really instances of setness. It 
will also be necessary to continue researching in the area of AVT, especially in terms of 
audiovisual genres and in the definition of documentary films, so as to permit a more 
thorough description o
f “The Real Da Vinci Code” and of other documentaries to be 
collected. 
This further collection of documentaries will be the starting point for the corpus 
study to be developed within the Corpógrafo, an integrated suite of online tools 
produced by Linguateca (
www.linguateca.pt/corpografo
) and Pólo CLUP (Faculty of 

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66 
Letters of the University of Porto), eventually with view to helping design a method for 
automatic extraction of set phrases.