La redondance, principe moteur de la cohésion du film sous-titré : étude de cas

Olli Philippe Lautenbacher

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Abstract

This article aims at redefining the mechanics of cohesion and coherence in subtitled audiovisual documents by emphasizing how cohesion is built upon reference and that its driving force is redundancy, the latter concept being in some need of rehabilitation, in our view. For the receiver, understanding a film excerpt consists above all in reconstructing the cohesive links between referential elements, which can be either given or implicit. Semantic recovery (which is of mnemonic rather than textual type) follows a principle of embedded anaphors or cohesive chains, where the triggering element can be of various natures: name, pronoun, picture or sound. The designated element, in turn, can perfectly turn out to be undefined, in which case the receiver has to identify the most plausible referential content through his own background knowledge or from the associated context suggested to him by the document. Examples of multimodal redundancy and narrative cohesion will be taken from a French feature film, and analysed through the reception they encountered among foreign viewers, grouped under three different subtitle conditions.

Keywords

Redundancy, cohesion, multimodality, subtitling, reception