Facework in translating and re-narrating vulgar language: the case of Macron's harsh statement against the unvaccinated in English language and Greek mainstream and alternative media

Abstract

The present paper investigates, from a comparative and cross-cultural perspective, how ‘journalators’ in English-language and Greek media rendered a controversial statement by French President E. Macron against the non-vaccinated, with the use of the slang verb emmerder. The paper examines how journalators sought to render the verb and re-narrate that particular discursive instance, largely judged as vulgar, divisive and improper for a head of state, in order to save or aggravate the French president's face through selective appropriation and reframing. It draws on narrative theory of translation as developed by Mona Baker (2005, 2006, 2010), and explores the concept of facework (Goffmann, 1967; Brown and Levinson, 1978, 1987; Bull and Fetzer, 2010) and the notion of ethos (Mainguenau, 2002, 2014) to analyze from a critical discourse analytic perspective a corpus of press articles in English and Greek. The results of both quantitative and qualitative analysis indicate that there is an array of lexical choices and strategies to intensify or attenuate vulgarity and offensiveness and save or aggravate Macron's image. The study has also confirmed the role of ideology and ideological positioning in the choice not only of lexical choices but also what is selected or deselected to be translated.