Stylization and representation in subtitles: can less be more?

This article considers film dialogues and interlingual subtitles from the point of view of linguistic and cultural representation, and revisits from that perspective the question of loss, as a platform for considering alternative views on the topic and broader theoretical issues. The cross-cultural pragmatics perspective and focus on viewers’ reactions that dealing with representation entails cast the question of loss in a different light and opens up avenues for alternative modes of analysis. They make room for subtitles to be construed as producing their own systems of multimodal textual representation and modes of interpretation, and for their text to be recognised as having a greater expressive and representational potential than face values might suggest. This is the argument, informed by Fowler's Theory of Mode (1991, 2000), that is taken up in the paper, and harnessed to the review of examples or observations from recent studies on subtitles, and complementary evidence from dubbing. The capacity of subtitles to produce insights into the cultures and languages represented is of particular interest, and has wider implications for the culturally instrumental functions of subtitles and translation strategies

Communicative rituals and audiovisual translation - Representation of otherness in film subtitles

In 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 (1991, 2000) to assess subtitles’ potential to mean cross-culturally as text

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

This article focuses on film subtitles, as a distinctive instantiation of cinematic discourse and a distinctive form of translation. Like dubbing and audiovisual translation more broadly, interlingual subtitling is increasingly recognised as a meaning-making mode and language variety in its own right, so far usually with application to single language pairs. In the pilot study reported here, the representational potential of subtitling is approached comparatively across different languages, with a dual objective: to further enquiry into the distinctiveness and creativity of subtitling as a mode of expression, and to make a start on inspecting how different languages may harness their own specificities to the demands and opportunities of interlingual subtitling. The work has drawn on (Romance) French, Italian, Spanish and (Germanic) English and German subtitle data, all from Lonergan's 2016 feature film in US English Manchester by the Sea. Representation of source dialogues is explored qualitatively across these languages from a broad cross-cultural pragmatics perspective, in a subset of scenes from across the film and with particular focus on functional pragmatic markers. The study is exploratory at this stage, but part of a broader agenda intended to increase our understanding of audiovisual translation as intercultural mediation

Ocean’s Eleven stand-alone Scene 12 with subtitles: A gift for teaching, what lessons for research?

This article considers Scene12 from Soderbergh’s 2001 Ocean’s Eleven from two angles: as a productive scene for teaching fundamentals of audiovisual translation (AVT), and as a cautionary tale for research. Scene 12 is unusual and unrepresentative in its all-in-one illustrative richness, and a comprehensive microcosm that makes it an excellent tool for teaching, and drawing attention to basic and more complex aspects and features of cultural and linguistic transfer in a multimodal context. By the same token, it is an invitation to (re-)appraise on the larger scale of full cinematic contexts the complexity of AVT as cross-cultural mediation and its implications for research. The article is one of several focusing on Ocean’s Eleven Scene12 for the Special Issue of Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice on AVT and Interdisciplinarity of which it is a part. The shared dataset for the scene and rationale for its choice are found in the Introduction to the volume

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

This article focuses on linguistic and cultural representation in AVT as a medium of intercultural literacy. It has two objectives: it puts to the test increasingly accepted assumptions about AVT modalities’ distinctive meaning potential and expressive capacity (e.g. Guillot 2016a, 2017 for subtitling), with a case study of communicative practices in their representation, via AVT, in subtitles across Romance and Germanic languages. The second objective is to make a start on a neglected question to date, by considering, concurrently, the respective potential for representation of different types of languages, Indo-European in the first instance, in different pair configurations. The study applies to (Romance) French, Italian, Spanish and (Germanic) English and German and uses a cross-cultural pragmatics framework to explore representation, per se and comparatively across the languages represented in the main data, Lonnergan’s 2016 feature film Manchester by the Sea. Data is approached qualitatively from a target text end in the first instance and primarily, in a subset of scenes from across the film. Quantitative analysis is used complementarily for diagnostic purposes or as a complementary source of evidence, with initial focus on types of features identified in earlier studies as a locus of stylised representation in subtitling (e.g. pronominal address, greetings, thanking) with evidence of distinctive pragmatic indexing (Guillot 2017). The study is a pilot study and is largely exploratory at this stage,but is part of a broader endeavour to inform debates about, and build up the picture of, AVT as cross-cultural mediation and, ultimately, promote our understanding of films in translation’s societal impact

AVT as Intercultural Mediation

This article addresses a question central for a special issue of Multilingua on audiovisual translation (AVT) for which it provides theoretical contextualisation. What is the relationship between the cross- and the intercultural in audiovisual translation? The question underpins fundamental debates in the emergent field of AVT as cross/intercultural mediation, the focus of the volume for which it is a contribution, with subtitling and dubbing the two main interlingual modes considered in its pages from an interdisciplinary perspective embracing translation and audiovisual translation studies, pragmatics and cross-cultural pragmatics and film studies. The article doubles up as the introduction for the special issue, and provides its rationale and contents. Keywords: Audiovisual translation, intercultural, cross-cultural, mediatio