Communicative Rituals and Audiovisual Translation – Representation of Otherness in Film Subtitles

Abstract

RÉSUMÉDans une étude comparative de salutations dans les échanges entre amis en Australie et en France (Béal et Traverso 2010), les pratiques interactionnelles observées dans le corpus rassemblé présentent certes des points communs, mais aussi des spécificités verbales et nonverbales dont la récurrence est interprétée comme révélant un lien entre styles conversationnels et valeurs culturelles sous-jacentes.Comme le fait également la pragmatique comparée en général, cette conclusion soulève des questions de représentation pour l'audiovisuel et la traduction audiovisuelle: comment les routines conversationnelles sont-elles projetées dans les dialogues de film et dans leurs traductions par le biais du sous-titrage ou du doublage? Quel est l'impact de ces représentations sur les spectateurs? Ces questions servent de base à une étude de cas qui s'attache dans cet article aux salutations et autres routines conversationnelles dans les soustitres en anglais de trois films contemporains, deux en français, un en espagnol. Elles sont abordées dans une perspective de pragmatique comparée et avec pour toile de fond la théorie du mode de Fowler (1991de Fowler ( , 2000, aux fins d'évaluer le potentiel textuel des sous-titres de film à signifier dans une perspective interculturelle. ABSTRACTIn a contrastive study of front door rituals between friends in Australia and France (Béal and Traverso 2010), the interactional practices observed in the corpus collected are shown to exhibit distinctive verbal and non-verbal features, despite similarities. The recurrence of these features is interpreted as evidence of a link between conversational style and underlying cultural values.Like contrastive work in cross-cultural pragmatics more generally, this conclusion raises questions of representation from an audiovisual and audiovisual translation perspective: how are standard conversational routines depicted in film dialogues and in their translation in subtitling or dubbing? What are the implications of these textual representations for audiences? These questions serve as platform for the case study in this article, of greetings and other communicative rituals in a dataset of two French and one Spanish contemporary films and their subtitles in English. They are addressed from an interactional cross-cultural pragmatics perspective and draw on Fowler's Theory of Mode (1991Mode ( , 2000 to assess subtitles' potential to mean cross-culturally as text.

Subtitling’s cross-cultural expressivity put to the test: A cross-sectional study of linguistic and cultural representation across Romance and Germanic languages

“…-to put further to the test assumptions about AVT modalities' distinctive meaning potential and expressive capacity (e.g. Guillot 2019, 2016bfor subtitling, Pavesi 2018 for dubbing), with a case study of communicative practices in their representation, via AVT, in film data subtitled into and/or from Romance and Germanic languages;…”

The pragmatics of audiovisual translation: Voices from within in film subtitling

“…This has been observed across across a range of communicative practices (e.g. greetings, pronominal address or phone routines; Guillot, 2010Guillot, , 2016b, and, more recently, taboo language (Guillot, 2019), as recapitulated briefly in the next section.…”

Reappraising verbal language in audiovisual translation: From description to application

“…The languages of dubbing should also be compared across different target languages and cultures, a crucial research avenue that is still under-investigated (but see for instance the comparative study of dubbing into European and Canadian French in Mboudjeke, 2016). From the complementary perspective of subtitling, Guillot (2016) argues that subtitles make up a text within the text and brings attention to their "meaning potential as text, that is [to] subtitles' capacity to mean on their own terms, as a necessary step for developing a better understanding of their interplay with other meaning-making resources from the broader semiotic context" (p. 607). The idea that subtitles follow their own logic and their own agenda vis-à-vis original dialogues was already put forward by Remael (2003), in this way supporting the view that the verbal component of AVT merits close scrutiny.…”

“…They include engaging with the sequential dimension of verbal language, seen as motivated series of connected utterances as with Conversation Analysis and Appraisal Theory (Pérez-González, 2007. They also comprise the examination of how the dialogue sprawls vertically from beginning to end within the AV text, developing its own norms during the process (Guillot, 2016). The language of AVT can also be addressed by looking at individual words and expressions repeated across different texts to identify registers, genres and ideology within corpus-based approaches to AVT (Baños, Bruti & Zanotti, 2013;Mouka, Saridakis & Fotopoulou, 2015;Pavesi, 2016a;Levshina, 2017, among others).…”