Introduction

My article explores the question of how and to what extent the characters’ individual idiom can be reflected in subtitling and voiceover, the two methods of audiovisual translation popular in Poland. Presenting a case study of Ben Stiller's classic comedy Zoolander (2001) in two Polish versions, it focuses on the possibilities and limitations of oral and written translation modes in reconstructing the protagonists’ distinct “voices.”

Poland belongs to the block of Central and East European countries, where the dominant method of film and television translation is voice-over translation. However perplexing for the international audience (c.f. Woźniak 2008: 51), the concept of a single narrator “interpreting the lines of the entire cast” while “the volume of the original soundtrack is turned down” (Gottlieb 1998: 246) is nothing unusual for the Polish viewers, who allegedly favour this method over subtitling and dubbing (c.f. Garcarz 2007: 130–133). Yet, despite its omnipresence in the Polish media and its relative popularity with the Polish audience, voiceover has been remarkably unpopular with translation scholars, who have either completely neglected it, or stigmatized it as a method of no aesthetic value and consequently of no academic interest (Woźniak 2008: 51–2). As the Polish translatologist Monika Woźniak stresses, this conspiracy of silence needs to be broken. I therefore hope that this study will be a smallscale contribution to a more global analysis of the Polish voiceover tradition.