Forms of address and (im)politeness: a corpus-assisted study of Polish professional and non-professional subtitles

Abstract

The aim of the study is to analyse how the English form of address you is translated into Polish in subtitles. The investigation is embedded in the framework of (im)politeness theory. The data used for the study comprise two types of non-professional renderings: amateur subtitles (fansubbing) and subtitles written by sophomore students of English Philology. The study proves that fansubbers’ subtitles have a tendency to foreignise translation by ignoring the Polish sociocultural norms of terms of address, thus making it sound less polite and marked, while students’ translations show a tendency to make the original dialogue more familiar to the target (secondary) audience, and make it more acceptable and polite.