The King’s Speech: The Appraisal System as a Translation Analysis Instrument

Abstract

In many audiovisual productions, the linguistic discrepancy between subtitles and dubbing is observed. This study has aimed to investigate how the appraisal mechanisms of language (Martin, 2000; Martin & Rose, 2003; Martin & White, 2005) are present in King George VI's speech, in the film The King's Speech (Hooper, 2010), available on DVD, in comparison to the Brazilian Portuguese subtitling and dubbing, in order to verify the attitudinal shifts (Maciel & Rodrigues-Júnior, 2017) in these three instances of the same discourse. In order to carry out the analyses, the theoretical-methodological contribution of Systemic-Functional Linguistics, proposed by Halliday (1994), and the Appraisal System, more specific the Attitude framework, proposed by Martin and White (2005), inserting in the scope of interpersonal metafunction, are considerated. Initially, using the concepts of appraisal, retextualization (Vasconcellos, 1997) and agnation (Matthiessen, 2001), the role of the translator was settled, becoming a participant in the translated texts. The analyses have shown that the lexical choices of the translator can impact the translated text in three ways: keeping the evaluation present in the original text; changing the type of evaluation; or creating/excluding an evaluation. It is necessary to point out that, to translate a text, not only linguistic knowledge is important, but also textual and discursive. The predominance of appreciations of valuation was also observed, indicating that the king attributed value to things, not specifically to people. Thus, the king uses language to make the population aware of the catastrophic situation they were living in, to depreciate the enemy’s purposes and to value the task they would face, expressing his feelings on his lexical choices. That is, through his influence as monarch, he tried to unite the population against the common enemy: Nazism.