And Quickly Does it Flee. The Transient Language of Teen TV Series and its Translation

This chapter focuses on the language of teen series, highlighting some of the main conundrums that both translators and scholars need to consider when dealing with this particular genre of television shows. After an introduction on the natural and fictional dialogue of teenage speech communities, the chapter offers an overview of the most interesting and popular teen series in the history of television, which have either been studied or deserve to be studied by linguists and audiovisual translation scholars. In its final section, relevant translation hurdles are considered through the perspective of three TV series from different decades: Happy Days (episodes from 1974), Dawson’s Creek (episodes from 1998-99) and Skins (episodes from 2007). The usually rich landscape of cultural references, the distinctive nature of each of these fictional speech communities, issues relative to the specificities of the translation process and, especially, the recognised caducity and transitoriness of youth speech are some of the aspects which are put forward and discussed.