The Translation of Regional Variety in the Films of Ken Loach

The article deals with the films of British director Ken Loach whose well reputed films generally deal with social issues facing the more underprivileged members of society. This, together with Loach’s predilection for using non-professional actors who can be ordinary citizens, even unemployed labourers, has produced a film corpus rich in dialectal and colloquial language. This has caused considerable difficulties for those charged with translating his films into other languages, especially translation for subtitles and therefore in the written medium. The article compares the language used in Loach’s films with genuine spoken language via a corpus-based comparison and finds that transcriptions of the dialogues do conform more to real-life speech patterns than those of other film genres. Nonetheless it will be shown that translations, however worthy, still fall short of capturing the true flavour of the Loach oeuvre.