Strategies in Translating Lexical Items as Formality Markers in French-Language Television

Highly culturally-embedded elements of language like linguistic style and norms of formality and informality can pose a challenge for translators. Theorists of translation studies have historically considered the field of audiovisual translation in particular as a culturally homogenizing institution due to the strong commercial forces surrounding production of audiovisual translation. In this thesis, I discuss how speakers of French use lexical items to index linguistic formality and informality as an element of style. Style itself is a dynamic and continually innovative tool available to speakers to express identity and positionality of the speaker as well as attitudes toward their interlocutors. In French film and television, these stylistic features are critical to character identity-building and storytelling. In this thesis, I analyze France.tv Slash’s teen drama, Skam France (2018-2023), to explore how independent fan translators tackle complex translational issues of culture and linguistic style and how their choices influence meaning-making in narrative television. Ultimately, despite its drawbacks and complications, the collaborative, decentralized, and reciprocal nature of the fansubbing model reveals new potentialities in the form and function of audiovisual translation.