Subtitling Gender and Humour in Douglas McGrath’s Emma

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate gender and humour in McGrath’s Emma by applying Vandaele’s notions of incongruity and superiority, politeness theory as well as Díaz-Cintas’s linguistics of subtitling. Among adaptations of Emma, the 1996 version created by Douglas McGrath remediated Austen’s comedy of manners with great attention to gender roles resulting in verbally expressed humour. I intend to track through these references and look at the issues – female irony, violations of maxims of politeness, Emma’s incongruity and superiority, etc – which they raise. But my central purpose will be to re-read Emma from a subtitling perspective. I will analyse the linguistics of subtitling and text-reduction shifts in order to demonstrate that gender may be conceptualised in subtitling and that Emma’s speech acts are reproduced faithfully by audio-visual media. Through dialogues, I suggest, subtitling may be considered as a form of culture-bound translation giving voice to gender and humour with unexpected results.