Czy są tu jacyś tłumacze i/lub pasjonaci slangu? Pierwszy artykuł z serii #Express yourself to „A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Polish and American Prison Slang within the Context of Selected Translation Techniques in Films with Subtitles” czyli socjolingwistyczna analiza polskiego i amerykańskiego slangu więzienngo w kontekście wybranych technik tłumaczeniowych. Artykuł ukazał się w rezcenzowanym czasopiśmie „Styles of Communication” i tam też dostępna jest jego pełna wersja. Celem autorki było zbadanie problemów tłumaczeniowych w filmach zawierających wyrażenia slangowe oraz wyboru metod i technik w poszczególnych frazach, szczególnie zważywszy na fakt tajności i specyfiki tej odmiany slangu.

Poniżej zamieszczamy wstęp, pełna wersja dostępna jest tutaj: http://stylesofcomm.fjsc.unibuc.ro/archives/vol-8-no-2

„Cultural differences around the world may pose problems for translators who face issues connected with finding equivalents in source and target language occurred in the films. One of the most difficult styles is constantly changing, the hermetic and colloquial variety known as slang. Depending on the environment, it may vary, even in one language, of which an example is prison slang used by convicts to communicate with one another. Although very pejorative and full of negative connotations, it is a very curious subject matter to analyze, as well as, to investigate how it is translated, because more and more films about criminal environments are being produced. This study examines which translation techniques were used in the cases of the movies: Lockdown (2000), American Me (1992) and Animal Factory (2000). The research focuses on the issues connected with the most often used translation techniques, the reasons of using them, the other possible solutions, the untranslatable phrases and with translating taboo words.

Many linguists (Appiah, 2004; Newmark, 1987; Orel, 1996) believe that there is no perfect translation because something is always lost. Whether this is true or not, the translator should always use an appropriate translation technique for a given case, and it is important to choose the best method, depending on the type of film. With the right choice, there is a great probability that the resultant production will be very well received. This study shows which techniques were used in Lockdown (2000), American Me (1992) and Animal Factory (2000) in the translation of particular prison slang expressions, which are the most popular ones, and whether using them was correct. Based on the dialog lists, the survey investigates which translation techniques developed by Vinay and Darbelnet ([1958] 1995) are employed during the translation of particular phrases. Unfortunately, translators of these films are unknown, however, their translations are available on http://www.opensubtitles.org/, the most popular website regarding subtitles. Prison slang in the USA and in Poland are different, inasmuch as the criminal environment is a closed community developing in separate places. One of the main distinctions is that Polish prisons are represented by two main in-groups; the so called gity (or gitowcy, ludzie, grypserzy) and the frajerzy, where the former have achieved the highest level of criminal initiation, and thereby receive respect from the other convicts, whereas the latter are disdained and cannot even touch a “git‟s” mug (Grabias, 2001, p. 248). Instead, American prison society constitutes representatives of different races, which are formed into gangs. This results from the history of segregation and the legacy of slavery in the United States (Krisberg et al., 2015, pp. 258–260). For this and similar reasons, it is sometimes difficult to find counterparts to particular Polish and American prison slang phrases. In order to do this properly, research has been conducted based on the following dictionaries: Urban Dictionary: Urban Dictionary: Freshest Street Slang Defined (2012), The Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (2015), Prison Patter: A Dictionary of Prison Words and Slang (1996), McGraw’s-Hill’s Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions ([2005] 2006), The Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (2015), the most extensive internet dictionary of modern slang: http://www.urbandictio nary.com/, as well as, consultations with people from the criminal environment. The corpus on which this study is based contains six separate types of material: the three original subtitles of the above-mentioned films plus their Polish translations. Most important, however, are the dialogs containing slang which appear during the imprisonment of the main and the peripheral characters. Moreover, it has to be remembered that this is a subjective analysis given by the author of this MA thesis and it may, therefore, vary from other views on this subject.”