Published Online: Sep 23, 2017
Page range: 71 - 82
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/tran-2017-0004
Keywords
© 2017 Greta Danilaviciene et al., published by De Gruyter Open
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.
The translation of elements of formulaic language is extremely difficult in subtitles or voice-over due to time and space constraints. Besides, it is very difficult to provide a comprehensive definition of formulaic language as its sequences exist in so many forms. Traditionally, 6 basic formulas are distinguished: polywords, phrasal constraints, meta-messages, sentence builders, situational utterances, and verbatim texts. The analysis of subtitles and a voice-over version of a film shows that differences in the procedures applied for the translation of formulaic language are insignificant, and the strategies used are distributed almost evenly between preservation of content, transformation and localisation.