Film Translation and Interpretation

Watch the whole film

Compare the existing script/scripts with the actual utterances

Note the differences

Translate picture information (cultural codes)

Observe time cuts, breaks, flashbacks, close-ups etc. (dramatic reasons)

Pay attention to problems of vocabulary, forms of address, family relations, titles and other such details

Often, additional research is needed (spelling of names, lyrics that are difficult to hear, historical events, literary issues)

Novel: published in 1998, based on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925)

Novelist: Michael Cunningham – journalist, political analyst and professor at Brooklyn College (English Department); received Pulitzer Prize for the novel The Hours (1999)

Film: screenwriter – David Hare; director: Stephen Daldry; Oscar nominated (2002)

Film language used to be considered as planned, stylised, lacking authenticity

Today, most writers for the cinema produce convincing dialogue, portraying what Halliday calls the ideational (information exchanged, experiences expressed), interpersonal (relationships created and sustained) and textual (the way speakers structure their dialogue, syntactically and semantically) metafunctions of real life (Halliday, M.A.K. An Introduction to Functional Grammar, 1994).

When constructing dialogue, a scriptwriter must consider the following factors of real conversation:

- the speakers may know each other

- some speak more than others, establishing their centrality

- some express themselves by creating complete clauses, others demonstrate varying degrees of ellipsis, minor and non-finite clause usage, clumsiness etc – indicators of status (the weaker party takes more care of his/her language use)

- some use more declarative sentences (initiators of dialogue); the lack of declaratives indicates a secondary position, a feedback role

- some use more interrogative sentences (“polar” in the case of information seekers, “wh” in more conversational circumstances)

- some, particularly women, use more tag questions, attempting to generate conversations