Translating Compliments In Subtitles.pdf

Translating

Compliments

in Subtitles

SILVIA BRUTI

1. INTRODUCTION

The present paper is part of a wider project that aims to analyse how socio-linguis-

tic and pragmatic traits are transposed in the two main modes of ilm translation,

dubbing and subtitling. In ilm translation, where contextualised communica-

tive events have to be transposed, the socio-linguistic and pragmatic aspects of

face-to-face interaction depict real cultural scenarios and are meant to represent a

wide range of situational variables. Hence, when turning from one language into

another, perfect correspondences (i.e. equivalent linguistic signs – comparable

socio-cultural meaning) rarely occur. The constraints due to the polysemiotic na-

ture of ilm texts (Gambier 1994) on the one hand and the customary dificulties

of mediating between source- and target language and culture on the other often

cause inevitable clashes on the level of social and cultural meanings, if not their

complete deletion. As has often been remarked (Kovačič 1996; Blini and Matte

Bon 1996; Hatim and Mason 2000), it is especially in inter-linguistic subtitles,

which reduce the original of at least 40% of its length, that emotive meanings

(e.g. terms of address, discourse markers, politeness formulae, reformulations,

dysluencies, etc.) undergo a severe process of reduction and transformation.

This contribution aims to analyse and evaluate the rendering of compliments,

ubiquitous and widely researched speech acts, from English soundtracks (either

British or American) into Italian subtitles.

TRANSLATING COMPLIMENTS IN SUBTITLES

2. COMPLIMENTS

Compliments are speech acts that are primarily aimed at maintaining, improv-

ing, or supporting the addressee’s face (Goffman 1967). They can in fact be used

for a variety of reasons: to express admiration or approval of someone’s work/ap-

pearance/taste; to establish/conirm/maintain solidarity; to replace greetings/

gratitude/apologies/congratulations; to soften face-threatening acts such as

apologies, requests and criticism; to open and sustain conversation; to reinforce

desired behaviour.

Compliment-giving and responding behaviour is used to negotiate social

identities and relations. As a consequence, inappropriate choice of responses

can lead to a loss of face. The preferred sequel to compliments is acceptance, but

in American English, for instance, two thirds of the time respondents to com-

pliments do something other than overtly and fully accept them (e.g. mitigate,

delect or reject, request interpretation; Herbert 1990).

On the basis of several socio-pragmatic studies it is evident that speech acts

are subject to cultural and socio-linguistic variations (Blum-Kulka et al. 1989).

Apart from macroscopic cultural and linguistic differences in the giving and ac-

cepting of compliments, some interesting changes can also be observed depend-

ing on socio-linguistic variables (age, gender, status, etc.).

So far compliments and responses have been studied in a wide number of lan-

guages. The majority of the studies are devoted to varieties of English: American

English (Herbert 1989, 1990, 1991, Holmes 1986, 1988, 1995; Holmes and Brown

1987; Wolfson 1981, 1983; Wolfson and Manes 1980), British English (Lewand-

owska-Tomaszcyk 1989; Creese 1991; Ylänne-McEwen 1993; Lorenzo-Dus 2001),

South African English (Chick 1996; Herbert 1989, 1990; Herbert and Straight

1989), Australian English (Cordella, Large and Pardo 1995) and New Zealand Eng-

lish (Holmes 1986, 1988, 1995; Holmes and Brown 1987) 1 .

In Italian, to my knowledge, there are up to now only a few published stud-

ies (Frescura 1996; Alfonzetti 2006 and in press). Frescura has examined a cor-

pus consisting of 979 compliment events, 90% of which were annotated by the

ieldworker; the remaining 10% has instead been recorded. The main preoc-

cupation of Italian speakers seems to be that of inding a balance between the

“agreement”and “modesty” maxims (Leech 1983), whereas, for example, Ameri-

can speakers are mainly concerned with agreement and Chinese speakers with

modesty.

2.1. COMPLIMENTS IN DISCOURSE

Even though compliments can serve a plurality of functions in different contexts,

there is widespread agreement on their nature of «social lubricants» (Wolfson

1983: 89), i.e. strategies that aim to establish or reafirm common ground, mutu-

ality or social solidarity. Often compliments – or the compliment event if we also

mean to include the response to the compliment – are quite independent from

the linguistic environment in which they occur, although they are frequently re-

lated to the topic of the exchange 2 . This independence makes them suitable tools

to use in opening sequences such as greetings or in thanks.

It is however true that like any speech act, compliments are embedded in

a larger discourse structure. As Golato (2004) claims, despite their lexibility,

compliments need to have some “hooks”: in fact, when the speaker pays the ad-

dressee a compliment, he/she needs to know and recognise the “assessable”, that

is the «object/talent/character trait» the compliment is about (Golato 2004: 27).

Golato shows how this aspect is closely related to a careful choice of referential

expressions 3 . Secondly, a certain degree of “positiveness” also needs to clearly ap-

pear in the utterance. This aim can be achieved through semantic and syntactic

means, but also – and to a larger extent – through the context in which they are

uttered.

In the literature compliments have often been described as lexible speech

acts, i.e. speech acts that apart from having a status and function of their own can

take on an ancillary function and thus contribute to – or even supplant – other

speech acts. Wolfson (1983: 88) states that compliments can «strengthen or even

replace other speech-act formulas» such as apologies, thanks and greetings and

can downgrade the force of face-threatening acts such as criticisms, reproaches,

directives of various types (that is displaying different degrees of strength, e.g.

requests and orders; cf. on this Holmes 1986: 488). The picture is however by far

more intricate than this, as it often happens that compliments do not differ sig-

niicantly from general assessments. In fact, there are utterances whose positive

meaning is to be gleaned from the context and that pragmatically speaking count

as compliments even though they do not look like them. Furthermore, there are

also utterances that employ semantically positive material but turn out not to

be attending to a praising function (if uttered ironically they may count as re-

proaches).

2. 2. SOME FEATURES OF COMPLIMENTS: SYNTAX AND SEMANTICS

Research on compliments, no matter in which language, has incontrovertibly

shown that they are quite formulaic in nature. The most interesting results for

American English are those that emerge from the studies by Manes and Wolf-

son (Manes and Wolfson 1980; Wolfson and Manes 1980). On the basis of their

investigation of a corpus of 686 compliments collected by the authors and their

students at the Universities of Virginia and Pennsylvania from a wide range of

everyday interactions 4 , Manes and Wolfson recognise the repetitiveness of both

lexicon and constructions and identify nine syntactic patterns that account for

the majority of the structures in their data. In particular the irst three patterns

cover 85% of the compliments in their data-base 5 .

The patterns are the following:

1. NP is/looks (really) ADJ Your sweater is really nice

2. I (really) like/love NP I like your car

3. PRO is (really) (a) ADJ NP That’s a good question

4. You V (a) (really) ADJ NP You did a great job

5. You V NP (really) ADV You sang that song very well

6. You have (a) (really) ADJ NP You have a beautiful living room

7. What (a) ADJ NP! What a pretty shirt!

8. ADJ NP! Good shot!

9. Isn’t NP ADJ! Isn’t that ring pretty!

Formulaicity is also to be observed in the limited choice of vocabulary. Manes

and Wolfson observed that nice and good, among semantically positive adjectives

certainly two that are characterised by low speciicity, cover together 42% of ad-

TRANSLATING COMPLIMENTS IN SUBTITLES

jectival occurrences in compliments. If beautiful, pretty and great are added to the

group the percentage increases to reach two thirds of all adjectival compliments.

Among verbs, like and love are the most frequent and occur in 90% of verbal com-

pliments 6 . Semantically positive nouns and adverbs (e.g. genius, well ) are very

exceptional, showing that compliments are preferentially expressed with a posi-

tive adjective or a verb of liking (Manes and Wolfson 1980: 400-401). Intensiiers

( really, very, such ) often accompany verbs of liking to emphasise the expression of

appreciation, whereas the presence of deictics (mainly this and that ) helps estab-

lish reference to the object of the compliment.

As compliments can occur at any stage of an on-going conversation, quite

independently from the choice of the current topic, Wolfson and Manes argue

that it is their formulaic quality that allows speakers to understand them as an

expression of solidarity and to recognise them in any context (1980: 405; cf. also

Herbert 1991: 382). Similar results pointing to the use of a limited number of lexi-

cal and syntactic formulae emerge from studies on South African English (Her-

bert 1989) and Polish (Herbert 1991) 7 .

Holmes (1988: 453) proposes a schema based on her analyses of compliments

uttered by males and females in New Zealand English with six syntactic pat-

terns.

1.a NP be (INT) ADJ That coat is really great

1.b NP be looking (INT) ADJ You’re looking terriic!

2. I (INT) like NP I simply love that skirt

3.a PRO be a (INT) ADJ NP That’s a very nice coat

3.b PRO be (INT) (a) ADJ NP That’s really great juice

4. What (a) (ADJ) NP! What lovely children!

5. (INT) ADJ (NP) Really cool ear-rings

6. Isn’t NP ADJ! Isn’t this food wonderful!

Holmes’s corpus was collected with the same methodology used by Manes and

Wolfson, i.e. ield observation. Type 1 and 3 accommodate however subtypes. The

interesting difference that emerges when comparing Holmes’s account with

Manes and Wolfon’s indings is the absence of patterns containing full clauses,

e.g. types 4, 5, and 6 in Manes and Wolfson’s classiication. In these cases the ex-

pression of approval is quite homogenously entrusted to all clause constituents:

an adjectival compliment (4 and 6), an adverbial compliment (5), and a semanti-

cally positive verb (especially 4 and 5).

The distribution of the syntactic patterns according to sex does not show

marked differences for the irst three most frequent formulae. A more remark-

able difference is instead to be observed when comparing the use of patterns 4

and 5 by women and men. Pattern 4 ( What a neat blouse! ) is used signiicantly

more by women than men. This can be explained with the rhetorical emphasis at-

tached to its exclamatory word order and intonation. Pattern 5, on the other hand,

is syntactically reduced (e.g. Great shoes , no determiner, no verb phrase) and seems

therefore to attenuate the addressee-oriented function of the compliment.

It has been noticed that sometimes complex structures may be substituted

by very short appreciatory sounds like “gustatory” markers (e.g. mmmh ) or other

sounds that convey appreciation such as ohh, ahh etc. Studies in this direction

have pointed out that these tokens are used in some varieties of English (Austral-

ian English, cf. Gardner 1997; American English, cf. Wiggins 2002) and in Ger-

man (Golato 2004: 78-79) in association with drinking and eating.

2.3. VARIATION ACCORDING TO TOPIC, GENDER, STATUS

Studies on compliments point out that even though an ample variety of topics

would at least be possible, only a few account for the majority of compliments

in the data (cf. Holmes, 1986, 1988). The topics that occur with high frequency

are: appearance, ability, skill or performance, possession, personal traits or quali-

ties. Compliments on appearance are the top-rank items but it is of particular

signiicance that they have their highest proportion in female-to-female interac-

tions. In New Zealand English (Holmes 1988), differently from American English,

males are often complimented on their appearance. Complimenting on appear-

ance across sexes may yet be perceived as too intimate or containing seductive

overtones; therefore, males prefer to compliment females on performance or

skills, not only or not always as a sign of their superior social status, but so as not

to be perceived as inappropriate or sexually biased.

Correlations between complimenting and gender can be observed. On the

whole it appears that women tend to compliment more than men and normally

perceive complimenting as afiliative or cooperative, whereas men sometimes

see it as competitive and face-threatening. However, if on the one hand women

are deemed to be better addressees of compliments because of their lower social

status (Wolfson 1984: 243), it is also true that women see compliments as an ap-

propriate strategy to strengthen rapport in a wide variety of contexts. Men, on

the contrary, seem to express solidarity and in-group membership in different

ways (e.g. the use of slang, swear words, insults; cf. Holmes 1995: 10).

As for the status of complimenters and recipients, Holmes (1986, 1988) points

out that 79% of the compliments she collected occur between equals, a result that

is conirmed for American English by Wolfson (1983). However, when compli-

ments are exchanged in asymmetrical dyads, they are preferentially addressed

to higher status females, probably because they are considered less intimidating

than higher status males.

2.4. SOME DISTINCTIONS WITHIN THE CLASS OF COMPLIMENTS

The speech act of complimenting is not only versatile in that it can achieve dif-

ferent perlocutionary effects, but it is also characterised by a variety of sub-types.

C. Kerbrat-Orecchioni (1987) draws some distinctions within this class: irst of

all she discriminates between direct and indirect compliments, the former con-

cerning the addressee, the latter given to a person who is associated with the

addressee and therefore metonymically reverberating on him/her. She also dif-

ferentiates between explicit and implicit compliments. Explicit compliments may

take recourse to performative formulae or to assertions where the judgement

is openly expressed; in implicit ones, on the other hand, this judgement is ei-

ther presupposed (e.g. “Hi, beauty”) or implied (e.g. “Your husband has very good

taste”). The categories are not always neatly separated and many combinations

are possible. For instance, an indirect explicit compliment like the following also

contains a direct presupposed compliment: “Your daughter is very nice. She has

the same beautiful eyes her mother has”. In the case of the so-called “cruel com-

pliments” ( compliments perides 1987: 7), an explicit praising content may hide a

more implicit anti-compliment: “How can it be that your children are so intel-

ligent?” or “This dress really suits you. It makes you look slimmer”.

TRANSLATING COMPLIMENTS IN SUBTITLES

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