Multilingualism serves an important function in the characterization of an audiovisual product; thus, its representation in translations demands scientific attention. The task of rendering multilingualism in translation becomes more complicated when no or limited access to the original audio content is possible. This being so, this study…

The codification of propriety -- talking with a 'proper' accent -- is recorded in audiovisual texts so that cross-cultural interaction between social groups is not left to verbal dialogue alone but to more or less accurate visual cues and to paralinguistic as well as prosodic information. This chapter will examine scenes from various audiovisual…

In a market dominated by Hollywood, it is easy to overlook that the number of films (and televised productions) which are not in English is actually by far greater than those in English. However, although some non-English language film industries are vast, only a comparatively small number of productions are screened outside of their country of…

Chinese subtitling of English trailers is essential for marketing foreign films in China, and there is a need to focus on audience reception. Ideal subtitles are expected to provide a necessary aid to the audience but to attract as little attention as possible. Paralinguistic factors like punctuation can influence the audience's attention and…

In original and dubbed film dialogue, direct questions are a means to depict interpersonal relationships on screen. In particular, pragmatic questions (i.e. non-questioning, rhetorical interrogatives) are frequently employed to mark alignment among interactants, in the form of affiliative and disaffiliative interrogatives, respectively expressing…

Insults are prototypical means to express impoliteness in social interactions. In film they are prime ways of staging conflict or jocular abuse, reflecting everyday communicative practices while contributing to the emotionality of dialogue, characterisation and plot advancement. Both original and dubbed films offer a privileged perspective to…

This article examines the construal, cross-cultural relay and comprehension of misunderstandings by filmmakers, translators and audiences respectively of "Bridget Jones's Diary" (2001) and "Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason" (2004). It reports on findings of a case-study on implicatures in these two romantic comedies (Desilla…

This theoretical paper adopts the point of view of the audience of subtitled films and outlines a theory of subtitles as communicative agents within the participation structures of film reception. Based on examples from three Swiss fiction films -- "Heidi" (2015), "Heimatland" (2015) and "Der Goalie bin ig" (2014) --…

This article focuses on linguistic and cultural representation in AVT as a medium of intercultural literacy. It has two objectives: it puts to the test increasingly accepted assumptions about AVT modalities' distinctive meaning potential and expressive capacity, with a case study of communicative practices in their representation, via AVT, in…

The popular anime series, "Cowboy Bebop", was originally created and released in Japan in 1998 and later gained an intense overseas following. The show owes its phenomenal international acclaim to successful conventions of hegemonic masculinity represented by the imaginary characters. The social semiotics of desire depicted in…

In this short commentary piece, the authors stand back from many of the specific details in the seven papers which constitute the special issue, and offer some observations which attempt to identify and assess points of similarity and difference amongst them, under a number of different general headings. To the extent that the "sociolinguistics of…

Hollywood movies have been a prime site for the representation of intercultural and multilingual encounters for decades. As such, they are not only of interest to everyday cinemagoers or home viewers, but have increasingly attracted the attention of scholars from various disciplines, including socio-linguistics. A main focus of much previous work,…

When films rich in cinematic discourse are translated, "character equivalence", the extent to which translated dialogue distorts identities in the original film, may pose a special challenge for the screen translator. This article discusses this issue in the context of "Talk to me" (Lemmons 2007), a film which showcases…