Abstract
The dubbing of foreign films in Quebec has, in recent decades, received attention in translation studies. Screen characters appear to speak a French that is quite different from current Quebec French with little account for linguistic variation. However, most studies were based on few examples, rendering them potentially anecdotal, and their observations somewhat contradictory. Often, the examples themselves were not further investigated with respect to correlation with the formality of the situation. We measured, in 10 films dubbed in France and Quebec, four linguistic elements explicitly associated with a higher degree of formality: maintenance of the consonant [l] of personal pronouns il and ils and impersonal il, maintenance the final consonant clusters, use of variable liaisons and of the particle ne of the discontinuous negation. This study provided a quantified picture of the phenomenon and verified that the language in Quebec dubbing is exemplary of a high degree of formality.
Highlights
L’histoire du doublage cinématographique au Québec, comme le rappelle von Flotow (2015), commence vraiment à la fin des années 1960 par une intervention de l’État québécois visant à corriger une situation jugée inacceptable qui durait depuis l’aprèsguerre
Les personnages qui, dans la VO, laissent entendre différents « accents » américains ou britanniques, s’expriment dans une langue française uniformisée ; qui plus est, dans une langue corrigée plutôt associée aux personnes scolarisées
À notre corpus de films s’ajoute un corpus de comparaison qui fournira des éléments de discussion : il s’agit d’un extrait de 30 minutes du premier épisode de la télésérie québécoise Les hauts et les bas de Sophie Paquin, diffusée de 2006 à 2009, dans laquelle est représenté un FQ spontané, mais relativement neutre dans la mesure où il ne comporte pas de traits linguistiques dévalués par la population,6 et de son doublage français
Summary
The dubbing of foreign films in Quebec has, in recent decades, received attention in translation studies. Screen characters appear to speak a French that is quite different from current Quebec French with little account for linguistic variation. Most studies were based on few examples, rendering them potentially anecdotal, and their observations somewhat contradictory. The examples themselves were not further investigated with respect to correlation with the formality of the situation. In 10 films dubbed in France and Quebec, four linguistic elements explicitly associated with a higher degree of formality: maintenance of the consonant [l] of personal pronouns il and ils and impersonal il, maintenance the final consonant clusters, use of variable liaisons and of the particle ne of the discontinuous negation. This study provided a quantified picture of the phenomenon and verified that the language in Quebec dubbing is exemplary of a high degree of formality
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