A Linguistic and Translational Study of Conventionalized Impoliteness Formulae in English Subtitles of A Separation and Life and One Day

This study aims to investigate the challenging issue of impoliteness in audiovisual translation. The main question is how the observed Linguistic Impolite Behaviors (LIB) were subtitled in English. To do so, the researchers extracted LIBs observed in the two movies A Separation and Life and One Day in which colloquial speech and LIBs are rich. Having categorized LIBs into different conventionalized impoliteness formulae proposed by Culpeper (2010), the researchers examined their equivalents in the English subtitles. The findings showed that among impoliteness formulae, challenging questions have the most frequent occurrences. This fact indicates characters mostly attack the addressee's negative face wants. Two sub-formulae of insults named personalized negative vocatives and personalized negative references were not observed. Another major finding of the study was that LIBs had the same frequency and type in both the original version and the subtitles.