Les moyens d’équivalence des unités phraséologiques dans les comédies françaises sous-titrées en roumain

Abstract

The present article focuses on the study of phraseological units in audiovisual translation. The phraseological units carry an important role in the process of communication between comedy characters. The problem of translation of phraseological units resides in the ability to understand them as a whole and to manage to find their equivalents in another language. Even if French and Romanian share cognate characteristics that demonstrate a universal dimension (defined by linguists as phraseological universals) translation of phraseology is a complex problem. The difficulties imposed by fixed word-groups reside in transferring their meaning and expressive force. Therefore, the subtitler aims at aiding the viewer to overcome the linguistic and cultural barriers. The hardest difficulty is not posed by the words and the word- groups for which we cannot find appropriate equivalents, but by the realities they refer to. The goal of audiovisual translation is to determine an equivalence between the source-language text and the target-language text (both should have the same meaning), keeping in mind that there is a certain number of constraints. The process is complete if the product of translation coincides with the source-text, in other words, if the first has the same communicative function in an equivalent cultural context. Consequently, the present study shall describe the available traductological approach to find phraseological equivalents by means of applying different translation techniques taking into account the structural, semantic, stylistic, cultural and functional peculiarities of the phraseological universe. The study is illustrated by a number of examples excerpted from different French comedies subtitled in Romanian.