A Cross-cultural Pragmatics: The translation of politeness in compliments and compliment responses in English animated films with their Persian subtitles

The importance of translation and cross-cultural issues in audiovisualtranslation (AVT) in today’s world is nothing new orstrange. The present paper was designed to shed some light on theintricacies of English into Persian subtitling. Comparativelyspeaking, film translation is less studied both at home and abroad.The data comprised of a corpus of speech acts (compliments andcompliment responses) from six American animated films thatsubtitled in Persian with the focus on the cross cultural pragmaticsand how these differences have been handled by Persian translatorswho produced the subtitles. This study aimed to illustrate the fullpicture of similarities and differences between Persian andAmerican English with regard to politeness in Compliment SpeechEvents which could assist Persian translators in translatingpragmatic and communicative competence. The methodologicalapproach is based on Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory(1999) and Geoffrey Leech’s pragmatic parameters (1983).Moreover, this study focused on the strategic function of implicitcompliments, aiming to evaluate their contribution to positive andnegative politeness and their translation in interlingual subtitles(from English into Persian).The findings of the study indicated thatall characters employed positive politeness in deliveringcompliments. In responding compliment, the characters employeddifferent strategies. The strategies are positive politeness, negativepoliteness, and saying nothing or not doing FTA.

Keywords:

Speech act , pragmatics , Compliments , Compliment responses , subtitle