Linguistic (Im)Politeness and Characterisation in Interlingual Film Subtitling

Abstract

This article deals with the question of the role of linguistic (im)politeness in fictional characterisation and rendering thereof in interlingual film subtitles. The discussion is based on a case study of the 2014 British action film “Kingsman: The Secret Service” and focuses on the representation of one of the film’s protagonists Harry Hart “Gallahad” as a ‘quintessential Englishman’ and gentleman-spy by exploring the pragmastylistic features of the character’s verbal behaviour in the English soundtrack and the Korean subtitles, as well as audience response of both language groups retrieved through the native speakers’ validation procedure. The analysis showed that in many cases the subtitler chose to deviate from the (im)politeness patterns of the original in order to retain the concordance with the situational context of a scene which resulted in the loss of some of the permanent features of the speech portrait of the analysed character. However, by deploying other pragmalinguistic devices, such as the predicate endings of different speech styles that are part of the complex honorific system of the Korean language, the translator was able to achieve a certain degree of similarity to the original impression of the character’s personality in a way that is understandable for the Korean audience.