Linguostylistic devices in the translation of a historical detective story: a case study of the French TV series “The Little Murders of Agatha Christie”

This article is devoted to a comparative analysis of the French and Russian versions of the French multi-episode film “Les petits meurtres d’Agatha Christie” (“The Little Murders of Agatha Christie”) in order to identify potential difficulties in the process of translating and dubbing a film text. The article substantiates the belonging of this film to the subgenre of the historical detective story, and also examines in detail the methods of conveying comic and ironic effects in the original and translated versions of the film. The main interest for our research lies in the linguistic means and stylistic devices used for translating ironic statements, idioms, song excerpts, wordplay, and different registers of speech. The work considers the theoretical aspects of film text, emphasizing the polymodality of this type of text. The practical part of the article analyzes the specific means by which the heterogeneity of the audiovisual work is realized. Particular attention is paid to the interaction of portrait, sound, and linguistic codes in the original films and their adequate transmission in the translation of each season of the series. The scientific novelty of this study lies in the fact that it systematizes, for the first time, some of the translation techniques used in audiovisual translation. As a result, solutions are presented for certain difficulties that may arise in audiovisual translation.