Ya care how me speaks, do ya? The translation of linguistic varieties and their reception

This article presents the preliminary results of a questionnaire-based reception study of some of the strategies and tactics translators opt for in subtitling when faced with the challenge of translating non-standard discourse. The study focuses on two main strategies – presented as strategy of centralization or normalization of discourse and strategy of decentralization in the present study – and several tactics identified as the most common in a descriptive study based on twelve Portuguese translations of Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion and Alan Jay Lerner’s My Fair Lady. The strategies identified in this study are briefly presented in this article as well as the contextual factors and working assumptions behind them. This is followed by the discussion of the data collected in the reception study, which brought some of those assumptions into question.