Abstract

The study examines how intimacy, threat and aggression is shaped in audiovisual translation (AVT), namely, how norms in the two prevailing AVT modalities, subtitling and dubbing, shape the message in the Greek AVT context. The study selected the third film of the Harry Potter saga, ‘Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban’ (2004), to identify variation in the rendition of the hero’s relational dynamics with other characters. The paper draws on Dayter, Locher and Messerli (2023) who acknowledge three layers of consideration in studying language transfer, namely, (a) mediality, (b) participation framework and (c) relational work. The analysis showed dubbing to intensify intimacy, threat and aggression, probably due to the oral character of the message in dubbing and potentially to the age of the target audience, which may need a more explicit message to be able to follow. A questionnaire addressing Greek respondents added to the validity of the study. The significance of research lies in that the characters’ relational dynamics in the film are influenced by the mediality of communication, the participation type of adult and young audiences, and the relational dynamics between fictional addressees.

Keywords: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, relational work, subtitling, dubbing, AVT

1. Introduction

As more and more multimedia products come to the fore and are instantly ‘consumed’ by source and target audiences alike, the need to exclusively pursue and thoroughly understand the workings of audiovisual translation (AVT) has never been more pressing. McKay (2011) suggests that contemporary media enhance socio linguistic engagement and underlying ideologies. Studying AVT often gains momentum over print translation as a more dynamic field of translation (Bogucki and Kredens 2009, Orero 2004) affected by multimodality. Awareness of target receivers’ needs seems instrumental in determining the end result, in both translation modalities, subtitling and dubbing, where the verbal level of semiosis appears ‘written’ and ‘oral’, respectively (Zabalbeascoa 2008).

The Harry Potter saga films I-III have appeared in both AVT modalities in Greek, with films IV-VI appearing only in subtitles in Greek. The study will focus on the third film, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), to examine how characters are reshaped in the presence of visual images, namely, how the relational dynamics (intimacy/in-groupness and aggression/threat) are transferred in the two modalities, into Greek.  Relational work permeates all forms of social practice and reveals speakers’ perception of what is appropriate in communication, in which speakers are engaged (Locher and Watts 2008).

AVT studies are interested in the representation of identities and their impact on audiences (Bonsignori and Bruti 2014) focusing on the representation of language varieties and how cultural and social values travel across cultures on screen etc. The present paper studies the relational dynamics between characters in the film, as established in the context of subtitling and dubbing. The study was motivated by the plethora of subtitling and dubbing data the saga provides and the awareness of the producers that the films have gained international recognition, so successful transfer strategies into other languages are expected to have been scrutinized in the audiovisual companies for appropriateness. This would add to the validity of the findings.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) draws away from the purely child-related themes of love/friendship and courage which prevailed in the first two films of the saga, and rather addresses a more mature audience. The film narrates the story of a teenage wizard, Harry Potter, and his quest for truth and justice amidst a crisis in the wizarding world that has instigated a lot of ambiguity on the matter of perception and morality. The story begins as Harry is informed about a prisoner, Sirius Black, who has successfully managed to breakout from the wizarding prison of Azkaban and who is reportedly set to murder Harry. As Harry and his two companions, Ron and Hermione, struggle to find answers and unweave the web of lies and deceits that hover around the escaped prisoner of Azkaban, in an unfortunate turn of events they find themselves in the presence of the notorious criminal Sirius Black, who then debunks their interpretation of the truth and reveals the real criminal and culprit to them for the demise of Harry’s parents.

Rendition of intimacy/in-groupness and threat/aggression, as unfolding in the film, allude to im/politeness theory and relational dynamics in cross-cultural transfer, which involves sociocultural understanding. It would be worth examining how the representation of the characters’ interaction with in-groups and enemies may shift when the communication mode (dubbing, subtitling) is modified. It would improve understanding of both the workings of im/politeness and the potential of the two modalities to shape discourse. In discussing sociocultural approaches to im/politeness, Μills (2017) refers to culturally appropriate ways of performing im/politeness, namely, the norms which are likely to affect individual talk. The study is interested in examining current subtitling and dubbing norms, also because of their changing and evolving nature (Díaz Cintas 2004).

The paper aims at outlining how the two modalities (subtitling and dubbing) may reshape discourse make-up (and character identity), in a target sociocultural context, by potentially applying norms which prevail in expressing intimacy or threat, in the two modalities. The area is interdisciplinary in that it involves an interplay of translation and pragmatics in an audiovisual context.

Figure 1. The interdisciplinarity of the field

Bollettieri and Bruti (2014) broaden the interdisciplinary potential of AVT studies by including more relevant areas of study:

Studies on audiovisual translation today can rightfully claim a central role in the process of understanding and clarifying many of the challenges and opportunities that the digital revolution has brought about. Although widely seen as a sub-discipline of Translation Studies, studies on audiovisual translation are truly interdisciplinary in themselves, bringing together knowledge of more or less traditional media, IT, audience reception, cognitivism and, of course, languages and cultures.

Using language to shape character identities has not been a novel idea. Culpeper (2001) explains how the words of a text create an impression of characters in addressees’ minds, in plays and other texts. The present study examines character formation in the two modalities. After the literature review and the methodological remarks, the study presents data samples which show that the two modalities differ in the way they shape the characters and their relations with others. The study juxtaposes findings of target language respondents to a questionnaire and draws conclusions about the nature of AV transfer in the two modalities.

2. Literature review

The theoretical framework proposed by Dayter, Locher and Messerli (2023) brings together knowledge of the past to suggest an interdisciplinary approach to pragmatics and translation studies. Even though aspects of the approach have indeed been discussed by a plethora of scholars (see Aijmer 2009, Kecskés 2013,Tipton and Desilla 2019, Guillot 2020, Locher 2020, House and Kádár 2021, Locher and Sidiropoulou 2021, Landert, Dayter, Messerli and Locher 2023, Desilla 2024), the model proposed by Dayter Locher and Messerli (2023)  suggests a framework in full alignment with the type and needs of this research, because it encapsulates a thorough and inclusive understanding of “what happens to pragmatic phenomena when they are being translated” (Dayter, Locher and Messerli 2023: 3) and what the driving principles are that inform this change. They identified three layers of issues that exert influence in the pragmatic output pertaining to both the translation process and the reception of translation artefacts; these layers are (1) mediality, (2) participation framework and (3) relational work. Each of these issues is representative of an aspect that may be taken into consideration in the process of translation, because it has the potential to inform, and even alter, the pragmatic output in the target language. The first review paper of this special issue elaborates more on this model.

Mediality, in the sense that Dayter, Locher and Messerli (2023) propose, refers to the different media present in a multimodal context and the amount of influence that these forms of communication may exert on the linguistic output in the target text (Dayter Locher and Messerli 2023: 4). In this respect, the issue of mediality is relevant to the aims of this study, because subtitling and dubbing are separate modalities and seem to be governed by different principles. In other words, even though the source product remains the same for both AVT modalities, subtitling is added to the multimodal experience, with the source text heard on screen (Gottlieb 1992), while in dubbing the source script is translated to be spoken in a target language.

Drawing on Goffman’s (1981) approach to the ‘participation framework’, this key concept is taken into consideration, in the model of Dayter, Locher and Messerli (2023) to differentiate amongst various participatory constellations (i.e. speakers, addressees, bystanders) in an interactional context and decipher how these constellations may impact the linguistic output. For the purposes of this study, the participation framework is taken to refer to the two groups of audiences that are involved in each AVT modality. In particular, since Greece is a subtitling country with a subtitling tradition (Luyken et al. 1991), dubbing predominantly addresses younger audiences who are not yet accustomed to the reading pace of subtitles, which makes subtitling the default modality of audiovisual translation for older age groups. The expectation is that more mature audiences can afford to extract meaning from the whole multimodal experience, whereas younger audiences are more likely to rely on what is heard on screen.

The last key theoretical layer proposed by Dayter, Locher and Messerli (2023) is that of ‘relational work’ which draws on interpersonal pragmatics. It views linguistic interaction as an ongoing process of negotiating meaning and relationships with others, through societal norms (Locher and Watts 2008). In this sense, relational work encompasses the field of (im)politeness “since how a speaker chooses language reflects their knowledge about (im)politeness norms and they are being assessed against these norms” (Dayter, Locher and Messerli 2023: 5). Relational dynamics involve both politeness (Brown and Levinson 1978) and impoliteness (Bousfield 2008) who examines realization of impoliteness in interactive communication.

If ‘mediality’ relates to the medium used, with ‘participation work’ referring to roles the audiences take, ‘relational work’ in AVT relates to speaker/addressee relation (intimate, aggressive) and has the potential to inform the identity construction of characters in this research. Research with audiovisual translated data has dealt with how identities are shaped in fiction and non-fiction texts cross-culturally by making use of pragmatics: Eikosideka (2024) examines male cosmetics advertising through a pragmatic lens to investigate how customer identity is shaped cross-culturally in men’s deodorant advertisements on the English and Greek market. Khusainova (2024) examines how Greek and Russian AV translators shape unfamiliar characters (in their respective target cultures) in an American film and accounts for strategies in terms of positive/negative politeness. Papakonstantinou (2024) highlights how audiovisual translation can advance cross-cultural pragmatic awareness in EFL, by observing dubbed and sublitled versions of a children’s film.

Even though one can easily claim that an audiovisual script is a fixed and predetermined format that only imitates reality, still there are a lot of novel insights to be gained through analysing variation, pertaining to the three layers of the model, which this study attempts to do.

3. Methodology

As suggested, the study selected the third of the six films, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (HPPA 2004), because the Greek audience would have been familiarised with the Harry Potter saga, by the time the third film was released and potential shifts would aim at involving the audience in the story, rather than familiarising it with the saga.

 The study made transcripts of both the subtitled and dubbed versions into Greek and focused on instances manifesting relational dynamics between ingroups and rivals, with a view to examining how they were transferred into Greek. The study identified 36 instances of ingroup relationships and another 51 instances of rival ones, and analysed how they were transferred into Greek, in the two modalities.

It devised three strategies, according to the relative intensity with which the intimacy/in-groupness or threat/aggression themes manifested themselves in the target AV modalities: neutralization, stressing, retention.

The strategy of neutralization is a strategy mitigating and toning down the thematic category under scrutiny (e.g. intimacy or threat/aggression). A striking example of this sort is the translation of the item witch as γυναίκα [woman], a translation that strips away the magical implication conveyed and shifts the spotlight towards gender identity: e.g.

STa: Not only was she a singularly gifted witch…/ TTa: Δεν ήταν µόνο πολύ χαρισματική γυναίκα…[BT. Not only was she a very gifted woman…]

The strategy of stressing accentuates an intended implication, which may be non-existent in the source text. A case in point is the translation of the item noble into γενναίος [brave] which enriches the source signification by adhering to it connotations of bravery: e.g.

STb: That was a noble thing you did back there/ TTb: Ήταν πολύ γενναίο αυτό που έκανες πριν [BT. That was a brave thing you did back there.]

Τhe strategy of retention assumes preservation of the intensity with which the theme death is rendered: e.g.

STc: They’re gonna kill him?/ TTc: Δηλαδή, θα τον σκοτώσουν; [BT. That is to say, they’re gonna kill him?]

As “(im)politeness should be analysed and interpreted through an emic lens in order to tease out the nuances of relationality arising in interpersonal interactions across different cultural contexts” (Ohashi and Chang 2017: 279), the study addressed a questionnaire (see Appendix) to target language respondents in order to doublecheck the implicatures following from discourse make-up, in the subtitled and dubbed version of the film into Greek.

The respondents were all young native speakers of Greek, students of the 5th and 6th grade of the 25th Greek Primary School in Trikala, Greece. They were 21 participants in total (8 fifth graders and 13 sixth graders) who, after the consent of the school’s principal, were given the questionnaire in the context of their English course and were asked to use their Greek language insights and select the translation that best describes feelings of (a) intimacy and (b) aggression. All responses were valid.

4. Data analysis

The section presents instances of strategies used for rendering intimate or ingroup relational dynamics vs. those of threat-aggression, relative to AV modality. It starts with how intimacy is transferred into Greek and goes on with threat/aggression.

4.1 Transferring intimacy/in-groupness

Example 1 is set in the climax of the film in which the revelation of the actual criminal is being made and the blame for fatally betraying Harry’s parents is transposed from Sirius Black to Peter Pettigrew. The former had been wrongfully accused for the murder of Lily and James Potter and was held captive in the Prison of Azkaban for 12 years until he managed to escape in order to seek justice for his late friends. On the contrary, Peter Pettigrew framed Sirius Black for his crimes and after faking his own death, he spent 12 years of his life in his animagus form of Ron’s pet rat. In this scene though, Pettigrew is forcefully turned into his human form by Sirius who is then fixated on killing him in cold blood in an attempt to restore justice for his long-gone friends. In the following extract, Pettigrew turns to Harry for forgiveness in an effort to evade the death penalty.

Example 1

Intimacy and interpersonal proximity are heightened in dubbing, as manifested through:

(a)’ο μπαμπάς σου’ (your dad), which highlights the potentially intimate relationship assumed between addressee and his father, James; ‘μπαμπάς’ is an informal item for ‘father’.

(b) enhancing the item ‘οίκτο’ (pity, which assumes sorrow and compassion caused by the suffering of others, implicating interpersonal proximity) with ‘θα με συγχωρούσε’ (He would have forgiven me). Even the subtitled item ‘να πεθάνω’ translating ST item ‘me killed’ assumes a more personalized suffering potential, which also appears in example 2.

Contrary to subtitling which is more source-oriented, the dubbed version seems to be shifting the dynamic of death towards that of pity (through ‘οίκτος’) and at the same time rendering the source term ‘mercy’ as ‘forgiveness’ which is the ultimate act of love and as a step further from the act of mercy that was present in the source and subtitled versions. Hence, the dubbed version paints the portrait of a more magnanimous and charitable hero whose love overshadows any foul emotion.

Example 2 is set in the same scene as example 1, before the actual criminal is revealed. The three friends, Harry, Ron and Hermione, are still under the impression that Sirius Black is the culprit for the death of Harry’s parents and that he is set to kill Harry. Hence, it comes as no surprise that once Sirius takes out his wand and points towards Harry’s group, Hermione interprets it as an aggressive act against Harry and casts herself in front of him in order to protect him, claiming that should he wish to end Harry’s life, he will have to confront his friends as well.

Example 2

The dubbing option ‘θα πεθάνουμε’ (we will die) enhances the suffering potential in the narration and manifests compassion.

Figure 2 summarises the strategies used in rendering all 36 instances of ingroup relationships. The figure shows that neutralisation is mitigated in dubbing and stressing is augmented, with retention strategies also increasing in dubbing. This may be because the information retrieved multimodally, in subtitling, may get the message across and adequately complement the verbal message. In dubbing, which may address younger audiences, the verbal message is more stressed, probably because younger audiences need more help to perceive relational closeness which would otherwise be retrieved multimodally. 

Figure 2. Transferring intimacy

4.2 Transferring threat and aggression

This subsection focuses on how rivalry, threat and aggressive behaviours are shaped in the two modalities.

Example 3 is set towards the middle of the film and involves an encounter between Harry and Professor Remus Lupin, whose specialty lies in the defence against the Dark Arts. Harry appears to be vexed about the nature of dementors and asks Prof. Lupin for clarity on the matter. In the magical universe of Harry Potter, dementors are amongst the most sinister of creatures because their ultimate purpose is to drain their prey off every joyful memory or emotion until they are reduced to merely a shadow of their past self, a soulless carcass. Lupin refers to dementors in example 3 and highlights their foul and malicious nature

Example 3

TT item ‘[κ]ατασπαράζουν’ (devour) in dubbing implicates wild behaviour, threat and aggression to surface vs. the straightforward rendition of ST feed as ‘[τ]ρέφονται’ in subtitling. Awareness of threat is also highlighted through rendition of ST item ‘a person’ as ‘τον αντίπαλο τους’ (=their opponent) in dubbing, which accentuates the combative and aggressive attitude in the context.

Example 4 appears towards the end of the film in which Harry confides in Professor Lupin that he is disheartened about the eventual turn of events and feels responsible for letting his parents’ murderer escape while failing to clear his godfather’s name from the stain of the crime. In response to Harry’s concerns, Lupin urges Harry to interpret events positively: even though he was not successful in proving his godfather’s innocence, he managed to save him from the so-called Dementor’s kiss, in which the Dementors sucked the soul out of their victims, a fate worse than death. 

Example 4

ST ‘terrible fate’, which assumes awareness of threat, is not rendered at all in subtitling (neutralization), but is enhanced in dubbing, in that ‘άδικη καταδίκη’ (=unjust sentence) involves connotations of blame and condemnation that do not originally exist in the source script. Besides a ‘sentence’ entails a rather orchestrated bad ending.

Example 5 is set in the same scene as Example 3 and involves the same discourse participants, Harry and Professor Lupin, talking about dementors and the ways that a wizard may be shielded against their threat. Harry indirectly urges Prof. Lupin to teach him how to defend himself against these creatures by making a reference to Lupin’s successful confrontation with a Dementor that Harry bore witness to and was eventually saved by Lupin himself.

Example 5

Greek has a tu/vous distinction which may be manifested through verb suffixes, which have pronominal use in Greek. Translators have the option to render the ST item ‘you made’ in the plural (assuming interpersonal distance from the addressee) or in the singular (assuming more closeness and directness) which may sound as an accusation or praise, depending on the context. Subtitling thus favours interpersonal distance, which may mitigate the illocutionary force of the utterance, while dubbing favours interpersonal proximity which may intensify the  illocutionary force of the utterance, i.e. make it sound more of an accusation, highlighting threat.

Figure 3 shows the extent of intensification occurring in dubbing vs. strategies preferred in subtitling, relative to rendering the 51 occurrences examined from the film Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (HPPA 2004).

Figure 3. Transferring aggression and threat

Figure 3 suggests that subtitling is slightly more prone to neutralizing and more inclined to retain the pragmatic value of items vs. dubbing which is more open to allowing translator intervention which heightens awareness of aggression and threat.

Both 4.1 and 4.2 sections show that mediality, the first layer of considerations in Dayter, Locher and Messerli’s (2023) model affects the shaping of characters in Greek.   Both intimacy/in-groupness and threat/aggression are intensified in dubbing more than in subtitling, probably due to a set of reasons (the oral nature of the message in dubbing vs. the written form of subtitles, which have to conform to constraints, the fact that the ST is heard on screen, in subtitling, etc). Likewise, the dubbed version is richer because addressees are not expected to have the same participant roles in viewing the film, which alludes to the participator framework, the second layer of considerations in Dayter, Locher and Messerli’s (2023) model.

5. Discussion

Following Brown and Gilman (1989), McIntyre and Bousfield (2017) have highlighted the opportunity fiction offers for the study of im/politeness; they suggested that “the opportunity to gain insights into intentions and motivations behind particular forms of linguistic behaviour, is what makes fiction such a rich resource for study” (2017: 780).

The study examined (a) how the level of mediality (Dayter, Locher and Messerli 2023) may affect messages, namely, the effect of AVT modalities, subtitling and dubbing, on the make-up of the message (b) what the audience participation is expected to be, and (c) how the relational dynamics between fictional addressees (or between text producer and audience) may reshape the message.

Measurement showed that the two modalities favour different strategies in getting the message across. The strategy of retention heightens in subtitling, whereas the most prominent strategy in dubbing is heightening awareness of intimacy and threat. A reception perspective showed that questionnaire respondents acknowledged the variation, when asked what the difference is between the two modalities and seemed to enjoy the liberty dubbing takes to heighten awareness of intimacy and threat. Likewise, the roles of the audiences differ, in that subtitling requires for audience members to retrieve information from the whole multimodal experience, while in dubbing the participation of the audience seems less demanding.  Findings are in agreement with de Marco (2009) that “subtitling seems, in most cases, more synthetic and literal” (de Marco 2009: 193) than dubbing.

If translation theory distinguishes ”the ‘horizontal’ communication between characters from the ‘vertical’ communication that takes place between the film’s apparatus (which includes verbal and non-verbal devices) and the viewer” (Díaz Cintas and Remael 2007: 48), dubbing seems to care more about the vertical dimension (i.e. the communication with the viewer), because stressing threat/aggression or intimacy more effectively shapes the universe of the film for the viewer. This may be confirmed by de Marco’s suggestion that “[s]ince dubbing mirrors spoken language, the translator may make choices better suited to the way people express themselves in everyday language, making the translation freer” de Marco (2009: 193). In examining a Greek subtitled and dubbed version of the animation film ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’, Sidiropoulou (2012) also identified different translation strategies in the two modalities, with the dubbed version doing more justice to local cultural identities.

6. Concluding remarks

The study agrees with Yule’s (1996) suggestion that “much of what we say, and a great deal of what we communicate, is determined by our social relationships” (Yule 1996: 35) and examined social relations in the fictional world of film, but it attempted to highlight the effect which AVT would have on representing these relationships in a target multimodal environment. It showed that the two AVT modalities employ different strategies in rendering interaction, the role of the audiences are different in the subtitling and dubbing experience, with the representation of the hero’s social relationships also exhibiting variation, which ultimately affects his identity formation.

As subtitled video materials assist language learning (Díaz Cintas and Fernández Cruz 2008, Pavesi and Perego 2008), the subtitled version may be highly useful in L2 classrooms, for listening comprehension and other tasks, utilizing the appeal which the film may exert on learner audiences. “Subtitle readers find themselves in a rich perceptual situation since they are simultaneously exposed to multiple and semiotically different stimuli” (Pavesi and Perego 2008: 221). Papakonstantinou (2024) has designed exercises involving observation material from a dubbed and subtitled children’s film into Greek to boost learners’ pragmatic competence. Landert, Dayter and Messerli (2023) highlight the usefulness of corpus pragmatics, in studying pragmatic functions. A dubbed film of global appeal, like Harry Potter, is a highly rich resource for teaching and learning pragmatic functions. Desilla (2024) also highlights the pedagogical validity of familiarizing students with authentic audiovisual data and pragmatic phenomena used there in, through warm-up exercises, illustrative case studies and mini-research activities.

A limitation of this study is that it does not analyse the visual and audio channels of communication in the film-viewing situation, which may also convey intimacy/in-groupness or threat/aggression manifestations. The goal would require a different methodology. This is probably an open research problem. The assumption is that there are further insights to be gained through analysing variation pertaining to the three layers of the model, because (a) the channels of translated communication are profinerating in todays’ society (mediality), which potentially assume (b) different participant roles and (c) shape multiple relational dynamics on the continuum between intimacy and aggression.

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