only in a special sense. Characters on screen address each other as if they were
real persons while, in reality, a script-writer is, like a novelist, constructing
discourse for the sake of the effect it will have on its receivers, in this case the
cinema audience. Consequently, in the case of film dialogue,
some refinement is
needed to our key notions of text producer and text receiver. Thus,
potentially
Text producer 1=scriptwriter (film
director, etc.)
Text producer 2=character
A on screen
Text receiver 1=character
B on screen
Text receiver 2=cinema
audience
(Text receiver 3=other potential receivers)
A.Bell (1984) provides a taxonomy of categories of text receiver and shows how
speech style is affected above all by what he calls
‘audience design’, that is, the
extent to which speakers accommodate to their addressees. He argues
convincingly that style is essentially a matter of speakers’ response to their
audience, who include four potential categories.
Addressees are known to the
speaker, ratified participants in the speech event and directly addressed;
auditors
are both known to the speaker and ratified participants but they are not being
directly addressed;
overhearers are known by the speaker to be present but are
neither directly addressed nor ratified participants; finally,
eavesdroppers are
those of whose presence the speaker is unaware. Bell’s hypothesis is that the text
producer’s style is affected most of all by addressees, to a lesser extent by
auditors and less again by overhearers. (Eavesdroppers, being unknown, cannot,
by definition, influence a speaker’s style.) Adapting this classification now to
film dialogue, we may say that characters on screen treat each other as
addressees within a fictional world in which the cinema audience is like an
eavesdropper. What we know, however, is that in reality the screenwriter intends
the dialogue for a set of known, ratified but not directly addressed receivers—i.e.
the cinema audience, who then according to the above classification may be
considered to be auditors. (Other categories of potential receivers, such as film
festival juries,
boards of censors, etc. may then be considered as overhearers.)
In the case of mass communication, furthermore, Bell argues that audience
design is not so much a response to the audience (since the communicator cannot
know exactly who is being addressed) but rather an initiative of the
communicator, who forms a mental image of the kind of (socio-cultural) group
he or she knows to be the likely receivers. He also suggests that this kind of
communication inverts the normal hierarchy of audience roles, since ‘mass
auditors are likely to be more important to a communicator than the
immediate addressees’ (A.Bell 1984:177). Thus, it could be said according to-
this hypothesis that the style of a film script is more subject to influence by the
auditors than by the immediate addressees within the fictional dialogue. For
example, in the data to be discussed below, a fictional character appearing on
screen for the first time
at a dinner-table conversation, begins:
POLITENESS IN SCREEN TRANSLATING 69
Ce que je trouve navrant—et c’est ce que j’essaie de dire dans mon dernier
livre—c’est que…
[What I find upsetting—and this is what I attempt to say in my latest
book—is that…]
It seems plausible that what is primarily involved here is a scriptwriter’s signal to
mass auditors that the character who is being introduced is pompous or
pretentious; secondarily, the fictional character is seeking to establish his
intellectual authority with his interlocutors. In other words, the pretentious style
is both addressee-designed and auditor-designed but, in terms of cinema as
communication, the orientation towards the mass auditors is perhaps the
overriding consideration.
The relevance of these audience-design distinctions to our consideration of the
subtitler’s task may now become apparent. As a translator, the subtitler is
seeking to preserve the coherence of communication between addressees on
screen at the same time as relaying a coherent discourse from screenwriter to
mass auditors. Given the severe constraints of the task as detailed above, hard
choices have to be made. Elements of meaning will, inevitably and knowingly,
be sacrificed. On the basis of our observation, we wish to suggest that, typically,
subtitlers make it their overriding priority to establish coherence for their
receivers, i.e. the mass auditors, by ensuring easy readability and connectivity;
their second priority would then be the addressee-design of the fictional
characters on screen (particularly in terms of the inter-personal pragmatics
involved). Specifically, there is systematic loss in subtitling of indicators of
interlocutors accommodating to each others’ ‘face-wants’. In the remainder of
this chapter, we shall illustrate such processes at work.
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