Polish translation of culture-specific items in Fawlty Towers

Abstract

Writing this article I wish to contribute to the study of screen translation, and in particular to the study of subtitling. The main focus of the present analysis is the Polish subtitling of cultural references in the British comedy series Fawlty Towers. Translating cultural elements requires on the part of the translator not only a great skill at language manipulation but also substantial cognitive resources needed to recognise these elements and arrive at the relevant connotations. In subtitling, the difficulty of the task is additionally compounded by some formal constraints such as the time and space constraints as well as by the fact that the message is communicated not only verbally but also by means of sound and image. However, these aspects of subtitling are not the focus of the present study although they are of great importance to the translator, whose choice of appropriate translation procedures heavily depends on these constraints. For a detailed study of formal properties of subtitling see e.g. Gottlieb (2004), Gambier (2003) or Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (1998).