Audience Perception of Characters in Pedro Almodóvar’s Film La flor de mi secreto

The study upon which this paper is based aims to contribute to the existing gap in audiovisual translation, that of audience perception, by exploring the relationship between subtitles, soundtrack, and audience perception. Two hundred undergraduate students took part in this investigation and were divided into three groups according to their nationalities: Spanish (Spain), British and North American (USA and Canada). The selected audiovisual material for the study was a six-and-a-half-minute clip from Pedro Almodóvar’s 1995 film La flor de mi secreto. Participants were shown the selected clip, subtitled in English, three times: twice with English subtitles only and the third time with the same subtitles plus the original soundtrack in Spanish. Participants were asked to complete a questionnaire in which they selected the most appropriate word/s in their native language which described the characters portrayed in the clip. The purpose of this exercise was to measure the effect of the subtitles on the participant’s word choice, firstly in isolation and then with the soundtrack. Results revealed differences in word choice for the description of the characters across nationalities