Reading between the lines, seeing beyond the images: an empirical study on the comprehension of implicit film dialogue meaning across cultures

Exploring the synergies between audiovisual translation, cognitive (experimental) pragmatics and film studies, the present article proposes a novel approach to the empirical investigation of audience reception. The proposed methodology is applied to a study on the comprehension of implicatures by British and Greek viewers in the two Bridget Jones films Bridget Jones's Diary (2001) and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004) and their subtitled versions. Inter alia, it is demonstrated that implicatures whose understanding presupposes familiarity with specific aspects of the British culture presented the Greek audience with substantial difficulties. Overall, experimental data analysis shows that source and target viewers did not always understand implicatures in the way the filmmakers would like them to and/or the analyst had predicted. This finding highlights the subjectivity and creativity of audience response and, therefore, the need regularly to corroborate research hypotheses through studies of actual audiences.