Sous-titrer la profusion des « secretions humaines » dans le Playtime de Jacques Tati : une gageure

This study aims at throwing light on the challenge that English-speaking translators face when dealing with the subtitling of French filmmaker Jacques Tati’s Playtime. How can they possibly reconcile its linguistic abundance with a limited textual space; the overlapping dialogue with the necessity to present information successively when writing a text; the uncertain status of the “human secretions” (alternating between the intelligible and the unintelligible) with the written code, which, as it will not allow a play with volume adjustment, imposes a clear-cut choice: translating or not translating. The dialogic chaos orchestrated by Tati constitutes an aesthetic commentary on the sociological identity of post-war France as the country was painfully entering the era of globalization. In the subtitled versions, do the constraints imposed on the translators hinder a proper representation of this identity or is the subtitlers’ creativity able to meet the challenge?