Subtitling is an important area of Translation Studies. However, research in this field has concentrated on the technicalities involved in this activity, while overlooking the issue of how subtitles are constructed linguistically in accordance with contextual factors affecting their production and reception. This paper sets out to examine Tim Burton’s The Nightmare before Christmas and its Brazilian Portuguese subtitled counterpart – O Estranho Mundo de Jack, aiming to investigate the extent to which ‘generic’ constraints in the receptor’s ‘context of culture’ affect ‘register’ variation and , consequently, lexicogrammatical choices in the subtitled rendering. The theoretical framework informing the study is based mainly on notions of ‘genre’ and ‘register’ proposed by Ventola (1988) and Eggins (1994). This paper argues that a different perception of genre in the target context controlled the choice of register, which in turn, controlled the choices of language in the subtitling. A filtering in the rendered text was found to have occurred so as to increase the appeal to a specific audience – mainly children – privileging their grasp and understanding of the subtitled version at the expense of other relevant features.
