Pragmatic of Translation Compliments

 

 

 

 

Pragmatic of

Translation

Compliments

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CONTENT:

 

Introduction  …………………………………………………………………………….  3 p.

Compliments…………………………………………………………………………….. 4 p. 

Compliments and culture specific items…………………………………………………. 4 p.

Compliments and AVT………………………………………………………………...... 5p.

Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………. 7p.

              

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Introduction

 

The present paper aims to investigate the translation of some aspects relating to the texture of linguistic politeness in interlingual subtitling. This paper will focus on compliments, as an example of culturally-constrained speech acts. Compliments are primarily aimed at maintaining, enhancing, or supporting the addressee’s face (Goffman, 1967) and are used for a variety of reasons, the most significant of which is perhaps to express admiration or approval of someone’s work/appearance/taste. On the basis of several socio-pragmatic studies (Wolfson, 1981, 1984; Manes & Wolfson, 1980;Wolfson & Manes, 1980; Herbert, 1991; Holmes 1988), it is evident that compliments are routine formulae and tend to use a few syntactic patterns and a limited vocabulary that are instrumental in the expression of admiration and praise. Some points, however, need to be raised to question this claim: firstly, as Pomerantz maintains (1978), compliments  2006 pose a severe problem for the addressee, namely how to reconcile the need to be supportive of the speaker and to avoid self-praise.

Furthermore, it might also be argued that compliments, although primarily polite speech acts or “face flattering acts” (cf. Manno, 2005), can make complimentees feel uneasy or embarrassed, thereby creating a threat for their negative face. Thirdly, it is evident that speech acts like compliments are subject to sociolinguistic and cultural variations (Blum-Kulka et al., 1989). As a result, macroscopic cultural and linguistic differences in the giving and accepting of compliments can be observed across languages.

Certain cultures are considerably more prone to complimenting than others, or they may prefer more indirect means of performing speech acts such as, for instance, expressing praise. This might be the case in English, a language where negative face work plays a crucial role and that has been described as an excellent vehicle for mitigation and understatement.

On considering all these aspects, we may advance the hypothesis that implicit compliments, i.e. more covert forms that do not look like compliments on the surface level, cannot only solve the dilemma that Pomerantz illustrated, but turn out to be more efficient strategies as they are largely more respectful of the complimentee’s territory and loosen the pressure on his/her negative face.

After briefly recalling the results of the main studies on the topic, this paper concentrates on implicit compliments in some American, Kazakhstani and British films in order to answer two essential research questions:

1) To what extent are these less formulaic speech acts successful with the addressees (i.e. speech acts that achieve the aim of creating good rapport and solidarity, or even, in some cases, some other more covert illocutionary aims)?

2) How are these  speech acts translated in interlingual pragmatic point of view?

The corpus of analysis is made up of various British/American /Kazakhstani: “Love me if you dare”,” Sabrina”,”Shallow Hal”, “There’s Something about Mary”,” Tootsie”,   “One thousand warriors”

 

Compliments

 

Compliments are speech-acts that are a natural part of everyone's daily interactions :in verbal communication between people, paying appropriate compliments and providing the adequate response is an important part of an individual's communicative competence. The functions of compliments include expressing admiration or approval of someone’s work, appearance or taste; establishing, maintaining or confirming solidarity; replacing greetings, gratitude, apologies, and congratulations; softening face-threatening acts such as apologies, requests and criticism; opening and sustaining conversation; and negotiating social identities and realities. As Goffman (1967) indicates, they are primarily aimed at maintaining, enhancing or supporting the addressee’s face and are subject to sociolinguistic and cultural variations As a universal phenomenon, compliments pay a pivotal role in communication, considering that breakdowns in cross-cultural communication may occur if there is a mismatch between the intention envisaged by the speaker and the one interpreted by the hearer. As an individual phenomenon, on the other hand, they help to define the social relationship between speakers and the interpersonal meaning established between them as well as the speaker's intentions. On the whole, language and the speakers' use of language – in this case, compliments - are indicators of the speakers' identity.

Compliments and Culture Specific Items (CSIs)

A commonly used expression within Translation Studies is CSI used to refer to Culture Specific Items, presented by Javier Franco Aixelá. The author does not limit this notion only to items that are specifically linked to arbitrary areas of the linguistic system of a particular culture such as local institutions, streets, historical features, place or personal names but instead, the author provides a deeper and more complete definition: Those textually actualized items whose function and connotations in a source text involve a translation problem in their transference to a target text, whenever this problem is a product of the non-existence of the referred item or of its different intertextual status in the cultural system of the readers of the target text.(FRANCO AIXELÁ, 1996, p. 58)Although Aixela’s expression may be used as an umbrella term for expressions that represent not only linguistic and cultural obstacles for translators in the translation process ,due to the multimodal approach of this study, we will choose to use CSI as the generic term for these phenomena. Considering that compliments are often independent from the linguistic environment in which they occur and that they function very close to metaphors or other expressions that may have no evident semantic connection to the topic of the context in which the utterance is presented, the majority of compliments may be defined as CSIs.

 

Compliments and AVT

 

The communicative potential and complexity of apparently simple linguistic formulae such as compliments are many times taken for granted. This is made even more evident in the case of translation and in particular audiovisual translation. If compliments are perceived as CSIs, then the translator will have to understand ST compliments within the norms and conventions that are operative in the source language and cultures. This means taking into account how much will they vary from one culture to another and whether the same compliments render the same type of interpersonal functions as well as the same cognitive effects for both audiences. The first step of the translator's task implies being aware of both source language (SL) and target language (TL) cultures the way of life and its manifestations that are peculiar to a community that uses a particular language as its means of expression (NEWMARK, 1998, p. 94).

 

In a second step, when rendering the compliment into another language, rather than simply focusing on literal equivalence, the translator must consider all the semiotic features of the scene in order to create a similar effect (of compliment) in the subtitles. If that does not occur, then the viewer will have more difficulty understanding the connection between the image and the text and it may give rise to misunderstandings. The final and overall effect will be, on the one hand, that the scene does not fulfill its intended purpose and the identity of the character is lost in the translation process; on the other hand, viewers fail to understand and enjoy what is presented  to them. Besides the referred constraints and the technical limitations inherent to subtitling, the translator has the additional difficulty of having to maintain the “color” and natural flavor of speech that are part of these particular speech acts. This leads us to another question which is that of the nature of the dialogue. Up to what point may film dialogue be considered an "authentic" speech act? Characters on screen interact with each other as if they were real but we cannot forget that there is a script writer and/or director who is creating these dialogues with a premeditated intention of provoking a specific effect on a target audience, in this case the cinema viewer. Hence, the translator/subtitler has a three-fold task: to preserve the communication that the scriptwriter intended to convey to his/her audience, to preserve the communication established between addressees on screen, as well as to maintain the relation between speech/text and image and, as a result, provoke the same effect on viewers from the TL:Standard written translation is neither addictive, nor synchronous, nor transient, nor polysemiotic. Thus it would seem clear that strategies for subtitling must differ from those for other forms of translation, particularly due to the fact that subtitled discourse addssomething to the source text, and the fact that it is polysemiotic (or multimodal). (TAYLOR, 2004, p. 158)

As Holmes correctly remarks (1988: 446-447), compliments most typically attribute a positive quality to the addressee, even when the compliment seems to refer to a third party:

 Complimenter: What a polite child!

Recipient: Thank you. We do our best.

The utterance is easily interpreted as a compliment because it praises the recipient for bringing up her children so well.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CONCLUSION

Translational approaches can be divided into two main groups: those that are faithful to the ST and serve the intention of the original author, and those that focus on the communicative intention with regard to the TT audience. The most appropriate approach is, among other factors, determined by the skopos of the ST" (FOERSTER, 2010, p. 83)In the case of the compliments of What Women Want it is difficult to determine exactly what skopos the translator was concentrated on, as s/he constantly swayed back and forth from either rendering direct literal translations of the compliments, in what seemed as an attempted to be "faithful to the ST", or at other times would try to bring the subtitles closer to the TT audience but still failed in achieving the same effects as those conveyed in the ST. In terms of the character’s identity, if Portuguese viewers had access to the subtitles alone, the image they would hold of Nick's character would be of an older, more conservative and humbler middle-aged man. It seems compliments, especially those who have certain nuances of sexuality, are packed away into more formal and bland expressions. Despite all the developments in AVT theory and practice, it is our perspective that in congruence such as this still happen today. If translators fail to fully understand and determine what their skopos is, they will be unable to apply translation strategies in  way throughout the same translation. Moreover, there is a growing need for translators to be more open and aware of the multimodal and polysemiotic nature of texts in order for the message to be completely conveyed in translation