A Study of Requests Made by Negative Politeness in English Movies and Their Persian Subtitles
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1102.15Keywords:
Politeness Theory, Face Threatening Acts (FTAs), Negative Politeness Sub-Strategies, English requests, Persian requests, Newmark’s translation proceduresAbstract
Based on Brown & Levinson’s politeness theory (1987), this paper sought to explore the negative politeness sub-strategies in English and Persian requests by analyzing the Persian subtitles of each British and American movie consisting of Little Women (2019), The Man Who Knew Infinity (2015), Twilight (2008), and Twilight and the New Moon (2009). The aim was to define the frequency of applied sub-strategies in both languages and the cultural differences in applying them. In addition, Persian subtitles of requests were studied based on Newmark’s translation procedures (1988) to both define the frequency of employed strategies and measure the precision of rendered utterances. Being fifty-one in bulk, all kinds of requests extracted from movies were analyzed. The study revealed that ‘State the FTA as a general rule’, ‘Nominalize’, and ‘Go on record as incurring a debt’ were absent in both languages. The highest and the lowest frequency of sub-strategies belonged to ‘Question/Hedge’ and ‘Apologize’ respectively. The frequency of each sub-strategy of ‘Impersonalize S & H’ and ‘Give deference’ was far higher in Persian from English. As to the translation, out of sixteen procedures, eleven of them were used. ‘Literal Translation’, ‘Functional Equivalent’, and ‘Reduction’ were the most frequently used strategies. Furthermore, subtitle of an utterance was rendered not according to the context in the movie.
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