“You’re asking me?”. Declarative questions in the English subtitles of Inspector Montalbano

The purpose of this study is to analyse the functions of declarative questions – i.e. questions having declarative word order – in the English subtitles of the internationally acclaimed TV series Inspector Montalbano. The dataset of the study comprises sixty-eight declarative questions, which were identified in the subtitles of three episodes of the series, namely “The Snack Thief”, “Montalbano’s Croquettes” and “A Ray of Light”. Data extraction was carried out manually from the English DVD releases of the three selected episodes. The study will aim to show that declarative questions play a role in the translation of Inspector Montalbano’s regionalised language into English. In particular, it will be argued that, being markers of spokenness and colloquiality, declarative questions help the subtitler re-create the regionalised voices of the original as conversational voices in the subtitles, a strategy which will be shown to be common practice in the translation of diatopically-marked filmic speech (cf. De Meo 2012; Tortoriello 2012). In addition, the study will highlight the contribution given by declarative questions in rendering the expressivity of the original dialogues, and will also deal with the use of declarative questions to translate confirmation checks having narrative importance.