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

Thinking of oneself as the thinker: the concept of self and the phenomenology of intellection

The indexical word “I” has traditionally been assumed to be an overt analogue to the concept of self, and the best model for understanding it. This approach, I argue, overlooks the essential role of cognitive phenomenology in the mastery of the concept of self. I suggest that a better model is to be found in a different kind of representation: phenomenal concepts or more generally phenomenally grounded concepts. I start with what I take to be the defining feature of the concept of self, namely its “super-reflexivity”: to use this concept is not just to think of oneself, but to think of oneself as the thinker of the present thought. I call this familiar observation the “Thinker Intuition”. I review some shortcomings of the indexical model of the concept of self, which is the classical account of the Thinker Intuition. I go on to propose a different account, the “phenomenal model”, according to which the concept of self is a phenomenally grounded concept, anchored in a generic kind of cognitive phenomenology: the phenomenology of intellection

Subtitling and dubbing in telecinematic text

This contribution focuses on audiovisual translation (AVT) and the relatively neglected domain of subtitling and dubbing in telecinematic text from a pragmatic perspective, in effect cross-cultural by dint of the interlingual transfer involved. AVT language is fictional language, with the additional twist of mediating text and meaning across languages and cultures in a multimodal context in which source and target remain intertextually linked. The chapter provides an overview of the main aspects involved in engaging with AVT from this perspective, and of the two main domains in which pragmatics has been represented within it: narrative aspects and characterization, and communicative practices in their interlingual representations. Audience design, stance, voice, versimilitude are key features for AVT in the pragmatics of its fiction, as in fiction in general. They are uniquely modulated in AVT by the idiosyncratic features of translation modalities, in ways which are yet to be fully mapped out

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

Self Matters

We argue that relating to myself as me provides, as such, a reason to care about myself: grasping that an event involves me, instead of another, makes it matter in a special way. Further, this self-concern is not simply a matter of seeing in myself some instrumental value for other ends. We use as our foil a recent skeptical challenge to this view offered in Setiya (2015). We think the case against self-concern is powered by unwarrantedly narrow construals of three key notions. One is the notion of a first-personal way of relating to oneself. A narrow account of the first person in terms of special epistemic relations to oneself makes it easy to overlook a source of non-instrumental reasons of self-concern, located in the special relation a subject has to herself as agent. Two is the notion of what it is to be a reason. And three is the notion of self-concern itself. We show that the skeptical case rests in part on a slide towards neighbouring but distinct notions of egoism and selfishness. We also argue that Setiya’s notion of self-love, offered to capture the pre-theoretical intuition of self-concern, cannot do it justice

Doing swearing across languages – The curious case of subtitling

How is swearing done in subtitling across languages? This study of subtitles in different languages for Lonergan's 2016 film Manchester by the sea addresses the question with a particular goal in mind: not so much to identify and typologise translation strategies for swearing in the dataset, or not just, but to inspect/document the range of resources involved, at the interface of linguistics and pragmatics, in generating meaning-making options for interlingual sense-making, and publics with very different linguistic and (socio-)cultural profiles. Most frequently occurring swearwords from dialogues in US English are considered in subtitling representation across the languages in the dataset – English, French, German, Italian, Spanish. Frequency and concordance data are the platform for qualitative analyses of a subset of units from different taboo domains in full textual context (‘fuck’, ‘shit’, ‘God’ and variants), from a broadly cross-cultural pragmatics perspective. The study is underpinned by two main lines of enquiry: how linguistic and/or pragmatic specificities of the languages considered may impact on representation; and critically, how the medium itself may shape representation above and beyond difference into a distinctive and richly expressive instantiation of cinematic discourse, as what is revealingly for translation, and pragmatics, the curious case of subtitling

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

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