The Enriching Functions of Address Shifts in Film Translation

Address modes such as vocatives and second person pronouns express social roles and interpersonal relationships, their shift indexing mutations in interactants’ attitude or status. Film provides a challenging context for the translation of these socio-pragmatic features, since audiovisual dialogue is supposed to imitate spontaneous interaction, at the same time creating characters’ identities and advancing narration. With reference to a selection of contemporary American and British films dubbed into Italian, this paper focuses on the specific issue of transitions from formal to informal address in the target texts. English and Italian differ markedly in this respect, with the tu-Lei pronominal contrast in Italian forcibly making explicit what may be left implicit or undefined in English. It is shown that, far from just deriving from linguistic features of the source text or conventions of the target community, the address strategies in translated texts may be motivated by attitudinal and diegetic changes expressed contextually and paralinguistically in the original audiovisual texts. Hence pronoun shifts are shown to linguistically code a change in characters’ mutual positioning, and anticipate or amplify the emotional intensity of key narrative moments. However, they can also result from dubbing translators’ creative interpretation of the developing action and interpersonal dynamics.