"Whoopseysplunkers! How absolutely spiffling!". Recapturing Gobblefunk in the French subtitles of Roald Dahl’s "The BFG"

This study centres on Steven Spielberg’s 2016 adaptation of Roald Dahl’s 1982 novel, The BFG. Its specific focus is Gobblefunk, the language which is spoken by the film’s ‘giant’ protagonists and which has a gently humorous quality. Taking a representative sample of the amusing features of Gobblefunk, the present article examines and appraises how the film’s French-subtitled version compares to Jean-François Ménard’s French-language translation of the original novel. Ultimately, this article seeks to determine whether or not Gobblefunk is recaptured as amusingly and creatively for the film’s French-language audience as it is for the novel’s target language (TL) reader.