Blaming, critique and irritation in the family through translation

This study intends (a) to heighten awareness of how impoliteness scholarship may enlighten translation research and practice, and (b) to broaden the scope of research in impoliteness studies by considering stage translation data. It examines Tennessee Williams’ play The Glass Menagerie ([1944] 2018) and two of its Greek translated versions (by Nikos Spanias, 1946/1987, Γυάλινος Κόσμος [Glass World] and by Errikos Belies, 2001/2014, Ο Γυάλινος Κόσμος [The Glass World]). It attempts an intra-cultural comparison of the two translations to examine how translators rendered impoliteness in family interaction, taking into account their chronological gap. The study takes an emic perspective to the data, designs a questionnaire eliciting respondents’ evaluation of impolite options and uses Garcia-Pastor’s (2008) model of face-aggravating strategies to account for the findings. Findings show that the second translation conveys the conflict between the main characters in more concrete terms, exploiting more face-aggravating strategies in relation to the first translation. The study also shows that the respondents seem to favour more impolite renderings by considering the characters’ intimate relationships, confirming the connection between intimacy and impoliteness. The significance of the research lies in the fact that it broadens the scope of (im)politeness theory and studies to include another field that could provide data for the research of such instances of interaction, namely translation studies and in that it shows the validity of pragmatics in enlightening translation practice.