Heurs et malheurs de la traduction du roumain ancien : le cas du sous-titrage français du film Aferim!
The Ups and Downs of Translating from Old Romanian. The Case of the French Subtitling of Aferim!

Summary/Abstract: Film subtitling is different from translation, as it is subject to numerous direct or indirect constraints, the main one being the space. Indeed, contrary to literary translation where one is free to choose the amount of space occupied by the written text, in audiovisual translation, there is a limited space assigned: one has which to express the most in as few words as possible, as faithfully as possible. Therefore, subtitling is a special task which requires skills that are different, but complementary to translation skills. Thus, in this paper, we turn attention towards the subtitles of the Romanian film Aferim! directed by Radu Jude in order to identify and study the different translation strategies employed by the subtitler. This film seems an ideal case-study for addressing the issue of archaism and argot translation, because it is one of the few – if not the only – films which evoke 19th century Wallachia, a time when the re-romanisation of the Romanian language is in an incipient phase. Furthermore, the dialogues have been analysed in numerous literary and historical research works in order to recreate the authenticity and the flavor of this language, bringing then even more challenges to the captionist.

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