Subtitling’s cross-cultural expressivity put to the test

A cross-sectional study of linguistic and cultural representation across Romance and Germanic languages

Bibliographic Data

ID11293179
AuthorsMarie-Noëlle Guillot (0000-0002-4382-8006, Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies , University of East Anglia , Norwich Research Park , Norwich NR4 7TJ , United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume38
Issue5
Pages505-528
Publication date2019-09-25
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueMultilingua (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0167-8507 • E-ISSN: 1613-3684
PublisherWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/multi-2018-0116
OpenAlexW2969648374
LanguageEN
Citations received6
References cited15

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, 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 with evidence of distinctive pragmatic indexing (e.g. pronominal address, greetings, thanking). The study is a pilot study and is exploratory at this stage, but 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

Applied linguistics · Contrastive linguistics · Cross-cultural · German · Germanic languages · Linguistics · Meaning (existential · Political science · Representation (politics · Romance · Romance languages · Sociology · Anthropology · linguistics and terminology studies · Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity · Psychology · Translation Studies and Practices

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