Interpunctive analysis in the interlingual subtitles of "Manbiki kazoku" (2018, Kore’eda Hirokazu). A comparison between Japanese and four European languages

This contribution intends to investigate punctuation in the prosubs of the Japanese feature film “Manbiki Kazoku” (Kore’eda Hirokazu, 2018) by comparing it with the English, Italian, French and Spanish versions in order to trace trends and points of contact between the four European languages and the original Japanese version. Contrary to expectations, punctuation has not always been the subject of in-depth investigations in the context of audiovisual translation studies since the phenomenon has often remained linked to idiosyncratic uses that are not always shared or shareable by broadcasters, subtitlers, and clients. As recalled in many recent studies, the rules of punctuation differ considerably from one language to another and the subtitles – for the purposes of fluency and readability – should avoid imitating punctuation practices that do not belong to the target languages. This study shows how subtitling that does not start from the original source texts and that – while respecting the translation practice – refuses to make use of punctuation, assuming that what must be translated is the mere syntactic-semantic content of the texts, cannot be sustainable.