Strategies of rendering non-verbal components in multimodal constructions comprising nationally-biased lexical units (based on British political video interviews and debates)

Abstract

This paper presents a comprehensive review of the research exploring non-verbal components observed in modern British political texts across two video genres, particularly focusing on the rendering of nationally-biased units. The emphasis lies on the phenomenon of realization of non-verbal speech
components in Ukrainian translations of political discourse texts and the claim that the strategy of rendering significantly depends on the emotional pattern of the presented material, such as interviews and political debates. Each genre of the political discourse has unique parameters for conveying information
to the interlocutor. Since the communicative aim differs in each of the presented genres, an interpreter encounters challenges in grasping the gist of the main idea in the utterance. Notably, non-verbal components of a communicative act are considered as the confounding factor in choosing the appropriate strategy of source language text translation. This article also investigates features of non-verbal communication, aiming to create a novel paradigm for rendering non-verbal components. To achieve this objective, the author analyses videos of two video genres such as interviews and political debates featuring nationallymarked lexicon of Great Britain. The study concludes that the genre-specific nature of multimodal texts is the contributing factor in selecting the suitable strategy for rendering discourse as a semantic unity. Specifically, the author considers two ways of non-verbal lexical units representation including subtitling and stenographic description and suggests “The Code of Subtitling” comprising criteria of subtitles creation, namely: accuracy, timing, length and readability, punctuation and grammar, speaker identification, handling accents and dialects, capturing audience reaction, censorship and sensitivity, font style and size and localisation. It is proved that the use of non-verbal components in multimodal constructions comprising nationally-biased units poses difficulties for translators and interpreters, who are therefore required to possess skills in understanding cultural awareness, empathy and a profound knowledge of both the source and target languages.