Fiction Film Dialogue vs Documentary Film Dialogue: Genre Peculiarities of Translation

The article gives an analysis of the film dialogue translation depending on the genre peculiarities of a spoken word medium, i. e. of a fiction film and of a documentary. The latter is traditionally disregarded by linguists and translators due to an established opinion that it lacks an overt literary aesthetic component. Thus it makes a documentary much easier to translate and its text gets closer to the information text the translation dominant of which is to render its information component. The article analyses an universal character of image-sense applied to different cinematographic genres. This thesis is demonstrated with examples from fiction and documentary film dialogues such as The Artist, Il y a longtemps que je t’aime, Espionne pendant la seconde guerre mondiale translated into French and Russian. It is highlighted that particular verbal components/utterances quite often get especially crucial in the context of the film dialogue increasing its poetic function and creating a complete image-sense. Such lexical units as personal pronouns «ты» and «вы» (you as the 2nd person singular in Russian and the 2nd person plural, respectively) have no small share in the above process as their adequate translation contributes to the audience's integral perception of the film as an aesthetic phenomenon. It is postulated that a documentary that deals with «the creative elaboration of the reality» has a lot in common with a fiction film in the regard of its compliance with the director's intention, the presentation of the sequence of events and their respective interpretation in the film. In this regard the adequate rendering of the image-sense of a documentary is especially vital in the analysis of events separated in time. That supposition can be backed up by a translation project carried out on the material of the film dialogue translation of the documentary «Espionne pendant la seconde guerre mondiale» from French into Russian.

translation, fiction film dialogue, documentary film dialogue, image-sense, genre peculiarity