Actually: The Concealed Lever

This article aims at identifying the role of actually in documentaries broadcast on television in terms of the types of contrast this procedural linguistic item points to and at assessing its rendition/omission in the Romanian subtitles. In its medial position in the clause, typical of this film genre, actually embeds the propositional content under its scope under a higher-level explicature which can vary according to the communicative situation at issue and the characteristics of the two elements that form the contrast. Therefore, actually encodes procedural information on how to compute the conceptual information it embeds. However, since these higher-level explicatures are not truth-conditional, they are not usually recovered in the Romanian subtitling, a type of translation which, under spatial and temporal constraints, focuses on the recovery of factual information at the expense of the interpersonal function of language.