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DELIA CHIAROwhich concerns the wider issue of the lack of dialogue in contemporarysociety.9.4.2.2 PRAGMATIC FEATURESFORMS OF ADDRESS AND DISCOURSE MARKERSLanguage-specific pragmatic features such as politeness and forms of addressalso create problems. Standard modern English has a single ‘you’ form, whichrequires differentiation in languages that have both informal and polite formsof address (e.g. French tu/vous) (Pavesi 1994), not to mention languages suchas Japanese with a more complex system of honorifies. Thus, amongst theissues faced by screen translators is the means of conveying the explicit shiftfrom formality to intimacy in the French on se tutoie? Or the use of the givennames in an utterance such as ‘You can call me Jane’.Similarly, translators also need to overcome the hurdle posed by discoursemarkers and fillers. With the severe restrictions required in subtitling, suchmarkers are an obvious choice when it comes to choosing which parts ofthe dialogues to eliminate. However, dubs also tend to restrict such markers.Interjections such as ‘Oh!’ and ‘Ah!’, as well as hesitations like ‘um’, ‘er’ ‘mmm’etc. in English tend to disappear in the Spanish subtitles of Four Weddings anda Funeral (1994, Richard Curtis, UK). For example, when the main character,played by Hugh Grant, stammers: ‘ It’s that girl, um … Carrie. You rememberthe uh … The American’, in the Spanish version it becomes Es aquella chica.Carrie. ¿Te acuerdas? La americana. (‘It’s that girl. Do you remember? TheAmerican’.) Yet Hugh Grant’s character is also totally transformed in theItalian dubbed version where his hesitations and false starts are also severelyreduced (Chiaro 2000b).TABOOScreen translators increasingly have to deal with what many consider to beoffensive language. According to Roffe (1995: 221) ‘the audience will be moreoffended by written crudeness than by actual oral usage’. Whether this is trueor not remains to be proved, but in matters of censorship, subtitles do appearto be weaker than the original. But again, so does dubbing (Bucaria 2007;Chiaro 2007). However, it is certainly much easier to disguise what may seemdistasteful to regimes, commissioners and translators themselves throughdubbing than subtitling (Vandaele 2002; Hargan 2006). On the other hand, theadaptation of The Simpsons for Arabic speaking audiences has been purgedof references to alcohol and sex and the family’s lifestyle has been generallysobered up. This, however, appears to have angered those Arab Simpsons fanswho want Omar to be as politically incorrect as his original US counterpartHomer. With the ease of accessibility of film and TV materials, as well as160

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