Chapter 7. “Don’t talk out loud, you lower the IQ of the whole street”

Abstract

This contribution examines impoliteness strategies and their translation for dubbing and subtitling in the TV series Sherlock. The theoretical framework is provided on the one hand by impoliteness theory (Culpeper 1996, 2005, 2011; Culpeper, Bousfield & Wichmann 2003; Leech 2014; Locher 2015), on the other by studies in stylistics that highlight the entertaining role impoliteness may play in the construction of characters (Bednarek 2012; Dynel 2016). In this series, impoliteness is the result of the exploitation of various meaning-making resources, all of which contribute to the overall outcome. The analysis shows that in dubbing and subtitling, a challenging case of cultural mediation (Guillot 2016), it may be reconstructed differently, with inevitable repercussions on the viewing experience of the target audience.