Shaken and Stirred: Language in Film in a Cross-cultural Perspective

In this paper I want to shed a little light on the role of language in film - or film dialogue - from the perspective of applied linguistics. I believe this is potentially relevant for such areas as foreign language teaching, intercultural pragmatic competence and contrastive pragmatics. The paper is structured as follows: firstly, I will briefly describe what I perceive to be the function of the feature film in educational settings, particularly in schools and universities. Secondly, I will outline the nature of language in film and the relevance of multi-modal linguistic analyses of film dialogue and their translations for the areas of applied linguistics mentioned above. To demonstrate this potential, I will then present and discuss some examples of a contrastive analysis of an English film text and its German dubbed version with respect to cross-cultural communicative preferences, and notions of cultural specificity regarding English and German.