Transfer of Evaluative Contexts When Subtitling Film Translation (in German and Russian Languages)

Abstract

The article presents the results of studying the patterns of evaluative meanings transfer when translating and subtitling films of various genres from German to Russian. Material for the study serves the original version and the translation of a military drama, a melodrama, a comedy, and a detective. The authors used the descriptive, comparative method, the methods of contextual, definitional analysis, quantitative calculations. The object of study includes the fragments of film dialogues in the source (German) language and the language of translation (Russian). The specificity of subtitling depends on the need of strict regarding the spatial and temporal parameters of the film text. Evaluation is interpreted as a semantic-pragmatic category (the impact involving appropriate semantization which is consistent with elocution through selecting the semantically relevant language). It is determined that the verbal component in the studied film text is highly informative, providing low complementarity of verbal and non-verbal components; the positive and negative evaluations are realized at the same frequency which is associated with a variety of topics and genres of films; the most frequent translational transformations, used in transferring evaluative meanings when subtitling, are synonymous substitutions, modulation technique, literal translation and specification; the most relevant methods of text compression, in this case, are a generalization and simplification. The authors verified the hypothesis of relevance for transferring the evaluative meaning through subtitling such elements of the valuation structure and the parameters of its verbalization as a type of evaluativity, object, basis, nature, degree, level of language expressions of evaluation, which detect differences between the source text and the text of translation. There are also stated the parameters which characterize the transfer of evaluative meanings and are the most resistant/stable to transformation and the most sensitive to transformation.