Verlan on screen : Use, representation and translation of verlan to Swedish in the subtitles of French films and TV-series over the last four decades (1984-2020)

Verlan, the linguistic phenomenon which consists of inverting syllables in the same word, emerged in the 1970s in the outskirts of Paris. It was initially regarded as part of the sociolect Urban French Vernacular and associated with youth language as well as with the suburban estates. Over the years, its use has spread amongst speakers, from deprived suburbs to privileged urban middle classes. Previous research indicates a decrease in the use of verlan in film dialogues towards the end of the 2010s. However, these results have only been based on a limited number of films. Moreover, they only accounted for fictional characters from the suburban estates. Finally, while the translation of verlan has mostly been examined in English subtitles, no studies have focused on the language pair French-Swedish. Based on a large corpus of banlieue films and other contemporary French films over 40 years, this dissertation aims at describing and analysing the use of verlan in film dialogues and its translation in Swedish subtitles. The focus of this study is two-fold: (1) a sociolinguistic approach examines the use of verlan, its development, as well as the characters that embody this linguistic feature in French film dialogues during the period 1984-2020; (2) a survey in audiovisual translation investigates how verlan is subtitled in Swedish and how the translation strategies have been used. To this end, we created a taxonomy of the strategies used to translate verlan. Three corpora of audiovisual texts were selected for these purposes: (1) a Corpus de films de banlieue (CFB) with 30 films from 1984 to 2019, broadcasted in Sweden both on state television and on commercial television channels; (2) a Corpus Netflix/UR (CNUR) with 31 films and TV series from 2015 to 2020, broadcasted on both the streaming platform Netflix Sweden and on the state-funded educational platform Utbildningsradion; (3) a comparative corpus with twelve films that were commercially successful in France during the 1990s. We extracted every term of verlan from the three corpora, as well as the corresponding Swedish subtitles from the CFB and the CNUR. The results obtained from the sociolinguistic survey indicate that verlan is constantly used and enriched during the whole period 1984-2020 in both the CFB and the CNUR. While the lexicalised terms are prevalent in the most recent texts from both corpora, we observe that the lexical variation is more salient in the banlieue films from the CBF compared with the varied texts from the CNUR. Moreover, the study indicates that verlan is a specific phenomenon that helped to create and to establish the banlieue film-genre in French film production, since the comparative corpus contains only very few cases of verlan. Finally, we show that verlan is nowadays used by characters among all social groups. The results obtained from the survey in translation show that the subtitlers who work for public service translate verlan most often with the strategy we name Argotisation, which replicates an informal and spontaneous language with elements of slang. The subtitlers who work for Netflix, however, tend to use the strategy we call Standardisation, which consists of translating verlan with standard Swedish, thus neutralising it. The strategy of Argotisation is used more frequently in the CFB than in the CNUR, which we argue is a matter of distribution medium rather than a question of film genre