New Trends in Audiovisual Translation

By Jorge Díaz Cintas

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2009 Jorge Díaz Cintas and the authors of individual chapters
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84769-154-5

Contents

Contributors, vii,
Acknowledgements, xi,
1 Introduction – Audiovisual Translation: An Overview of its Potential Jorge Díaz Cintas, 1,
Part 1: Crossing Cultural Borders,
2 Subtitling Against the Current: Danish Concepts, English Minds Henrik Gottlieb, 21,
3 Connecting Cultures: Cultural Transfer in Subtitling and Dubbing Zoë Pettit, 44,
4 The Codification of Nonverbal Information in Subtitled Texts Elisa Perego, 58,
5 Translating Proper Names into Spanish: The Case of Forrest Gump Isabel Hurtado de Mendoza Azaola, 70,
6 Frenching the Feature Film Twice: Or le synchronien au débat Luise von Flotow, 83,
7 Subtitling the Italian South Abele Longo, 99,
8 Main Challenges in the Translation of Documentaries Anna Matamala, 109,
Part 2: Juggling with Humour,
9 Strategies for the Dubbing of Puns with One Visual Semantic Layer John D. Sanderson, 123,
10 Translating Humour: The Dubbing of Bridget Jones’s Diary into Spanish Nieves Jiménez Carra, 133,
11 Dubbing The Simpsons in Spain: A Case Study Marta Muñoz Gil, 142,
12 The Translation of Audiovisual Humour in Just a Few Words Maria José Veiga, 158,
13 Gender Portrayal in Dubbed and Subtitled Comedies Marcella De Marco, 176,
Part 3: Dealing with Linguistic Variation,
14 Dubbing English into Italian: A Closer Look at the Translation of Spoken Language Maria Pavesi, 197,
15 The Translation of Swearing in the Dubbing of the Film South Park into Spanish María Jesús Fernández Fernández, 210,
16 The Translation of Compliments in Subtitles Silvia Bruti, 226,
17 Greek Soldiers on the Screen: Politeness, Fluency and Audience Design in Subtitling Olga Gartzonika and Adriana Serban, 239,
References, 251,
Index, 265,

CHAPTER 1

Introduction – Audiovisual Translation: An Overview of its Potential

JORGE DÍAZ CINTAS

Despite being a professional practice that can be traced back to the very origins of cinema, audiovisual translation (AVT) has been a relatively unknown field of research until very recently. Off to a sluggish and shaky start in the late 1950s and early 1960s, research in this field only experienced a remarkable boom at the close of the 20th century. However, over the last 20 or so years the audiovisual industry has provided a fertile ground for a burgeoning activity in academic studies with translation at their core. Apart from growing as a professional activity, thanks primarily to the digital revolution, AVT has now become a resolute and prominent area of academic research.

A Bit of History

The first studies in the field were brief and scattered in a wide range of publications going from cinema and translation journals to newspapers and weekly magazines. Occasionally, papers and manuscripts were simply passed around among professionals and academics without ever being published or reaching the general public. This unfortunate dispersal of fundamental research material not only makes bibliographical search into the beginnings of the discipline complicated for researchers in this area, but it also means that for some time quite a few scholars carried out their work without knowing what others had already done in the field. Even though this situation belongs to the past, we still lack a proper historiography of audiovisual translation and its study today.

Making abstraction of the research that never saw the ‘official’ light of day, Laks’s Le sous-titrage de films, dating from 1957, can be considered the first volume ever to have been written on subtitling. Though rather short, only 62 pages, it provides the reader with a very comprehensive overview of this technique. However, its publication as livre d’auteur means that its distribution too was very limited and very few scholars have had the opportunity to lay their hands on this book. The decades of the 1960s and 1970s were characterised by an acute lethargy regarding subtitling, although some minor articles appeared on the subject of dubbing, with the journal Babel publishing a special issue on cinema translation in 1960 which contained contributions by Caillé (1960) and Cary (1960). Most of the works written during this period adopted a distinctively professional perspective, focusing on the figure of the audiovisual translator, on the different translational stages, as well as on the differences between dubbing and subtitling, and the way in which audiences were seen to experience subtitling (Hesse-Quack, 1969; Myers, 1973; Reid, 1978, 1983).

One seminal article from the 1980s is Marleau’s ‘Le sous-titres … un mal nécessaire’, from 1982, in which the author classifies the different challenges posed by subtitling in four categories: technological, psychological, artistic-aesthetic and linguistic. He offers some orthotypographical recommendations on the presentation of the subtitles and transcends the linguistic dimension of the practice, considering economic factors, the influence of the film industry and the input of different professionals that take part in the subtitling process. This very same year, Titford (1982: 113) claims that the problems defining subtitling ‘derive essentially from the constraints imposed on the translator by the medium itself’, introducing the concept of constrained translation that will be later expanded to a myriad of (audiovisual) translation practices by Mayoral Asensio et al. (1988).

In 1987, under the auspices of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), the first ever Conference on Dubbing and Subtitling was held in the city of Stockholm. This event had the effect of triggering an unprecedented interest in AVT that materialised in the exponential publication of new books and articles in the field, among which Pommier (1988), Luyken et al. (1991) and Ivarsson (1992) are perhaps the most important ones. The latter’s work, the English translation of a Swedish original from 1986, benefits from an exhaustive knowledge of the subtitling profession, a detailed history of the technical aspects of subtitling and an early overview of subtitling for the deaf and hard-of-hearing. In 1998, with the assistance of Carroll, a revised, updated second edition was published, incorporating the latest technical developments in digital technology at the time.

Working from a markedly Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) stand, Delabastita (1989, 1990) was one of the first scholars to tackle the semiotic nature of audiovisual productions by discussing the translational implications that the multiple signs and channels that make up a film have for dubbing and subtitling. Although the focus of his contributions is primarily cultural, in consonance with the new developments shaping translation theory at the time (i.e. the so called ‘cultural turn’), he never neglects the analysis of translation as a process. Of special interest is his catalogue of the questions that should guide the prying research-mind of AVT scholars. Also in 1989, and with a very similar title to Delabastita’s but in French, Lambert published a panoramic work entitled ‘La traduction, les langues et la communication de masse’ on the power that mass media have in our society and the role played by language and translation. His main contribution to the field is perhaps his ability to introduce a new angle to the way in which we consider AVT, highlighting how susceptible audiovisual productions can also be to manipulative and ideological forces.

The proper beginning of a real flurry of activity can be traced to the 1990s – AVT’s golden age. The field became the object of more systematic research from a translational perspective in educational, scholarly and professional circles and saw the publication of collective volumes (Gambier, 1995, 1996, 1998) and the works of prolific authors like Gottlieb (1997a, 2000). Since then, and this is no exaggeration, we have been flooded with contributions on AVT and the true scholarly emergence of the field. Given the numerous conferences and other events regularly organised on the topic, AVT seems to have finally come of age academically (Diaz Cintas, 2008a); PhD dissertations and publications on the subject are a frequent occurrence these days and some universities and higher education centres have started to offer courses on dubbing, subtitling, voiceover, and accessibility to the audiovisual media, that is, subtitling for the deaf and the hard-of-hearing (SDH), and audio description for the blind and the partially sighted (AD). From being considered a minor area of specialisation within Translation Studies, the position of AVT is now rapidly changing, growing in significance and visibility thanks, amongst others, to the efforts of many young, novel scholars who have decided to direct their academic interests to the analysis of audiovisual programmes.

Gone are the days when scholars needed to start their papers with a reference to the limited amount of research carried out in this field, followed by a detailed explanation of the terminology used and the few publications available in this area before moving on to the real focus of their study. The hackneyed debate on the merits or otherwise of a particular AVT mode as opposed to another has meanwhile been successfully settled as well. Scholarly approaches have now moved well beyond value-laden comparisons, discussing whether one mode – particularly subtitling or dubbing – is better than the other to studies where the emphasis is placed on understanding these modes as different translational practices deserving of in-depth critical attention. It has become accepted that different genres and audiences call for different translational approaches, that they all have their pros and cons, and that they all have their place in the booming audiovisual industry.

Audiovisual Translation Modes

Even for those with an adequate command of the foreign language, audiovisual productions bring with them a whole range of obstacles for the unsuspecting viewer. Indeed, while attempting to recreate a real live situation on screen, they may hamper comprehension of a given scene due to fast paced dialogue exchanges among characters, the use of unknown dialectal and sociolectal variations, instances of overlapping speech and interfering diegetic noises and music, to name but a few. All these factors contribute to making the translation of the audiovisual programme a necessity for the vast majority of viewers.

In the main, there are two overarching, basic approaches to dealing with the transfer into another language of the spoken dialogue of the original programme. Either oral output remains oral output, as in the original production, or it is transformed into written output. If the first option is favoured, the original soundtrack is replaced by a new one in the target language, a process which is generally known as ‘revoicing’. The replacement may be total, whereby the target viewer can no longer hear the original exchanges, as in dubbing (also known as lip sync), or partial, that is, when the original spoken dialogue is still (faintly) audible in the background, as in the case of voiceover.

Although it is true that habit, cultural disposition and financial considerations have made of dubbing, subtitling and voiceover the three most common translation modes of AVT, this does not mean that they are the only language transfer options available in the industry. The typologies put forward by authors like Luyken et al. (1991), Gambier (1996) and Diaz Cintas (1999) distinguish over 10 different types of multilingual transfer in the field of audiovisual communication. For the sake of this volume, a brief definition of each of the modes discussed in the forthcoming pages – that is, dubbing, subtitling and voiceover – follows.

Dubbing involves replacing the original soundtrack containing the actors’ dialogue with a target language recording that reproduces the original message, ensuring that the target language sounds and the actors’ lip movements are synchronised, in such a way that target viewers are led to believe that the actors on screen are actually speaking their language. Subtitling involves presenting a written text, usually along the bottom of the screen, which gives an account of the original dialogue exchanges of the speakers as well as other linguistic elements which form part of the visual image (inserts, letters, graffiti, banners and the like) or of the soundtrack (songs, voices off). Voiceover involves reducing the volume of the original soundtrack to a minimal auditory level, in order to ensure that the translation, which is orally overlapped on to the original soundtrack, can be heard by the target audience. It is common practice to allow viewers to hear a few seconds of the original foreign speech before reducing the volume and superimposing the translation. The recording of the translation finishes a couple of seconds before the end of the original speech, allowing the audience to listen to the voice of the person on the screen at a normal volume once again.

The Potential and Pitfalls of AVT

Romero Fresco (2006) points out that when ‘looking back at what has been written so far, it seems that the most fruitful studies on AVT include or assume to some extent two basic notions: the independence of AVT as an autonomous discipline and its dependence on other related disciplines’. Although this assertion could be read as a contradiction in terms, the author aptly argues how these two ways of understanding AVT are perfectly compatible. Let us therefore investigate both sides of this coin in some greater detail.

As an autonomous field within the broader domain of Translation Studies, AVT is indeed an entity in its own right rather than a subgroup within, say, literary translation, as posited by influential Translation Studies scholars such as Bassnett (2002: 17) and Snell-Hornby (1995: 32). Both scholars place dubbing and subtitling within the larger area of literary translation, equating them with ‘cinema translation’ and ‘film translation’.

However, as discussed also by Chaume Varela (2004: 118-22), one of the main and recurrent misconceptions that has permeated the literature written on translation more generally seeking to ‘place’ audiovisual translation, is precisely that AVT is understood to be a ‘genre’ when in fact it should be considered a ‘text type’ that subsumes many and different genres, an idea already latent in Reiss’s (1977: 111) proposed superstructure known as the ‘audio-medial text type’. It seems rather limiting to liken ‘audiovisual translation’ with ‘film translation’ when films are only a small fraction of a wider variety of audiovisual programmes – including corporate videos, documentaries, TV series, reality shows or video games – that are routinely translated. Likewise, to talk about ‘film and TV translation’ (Delabastita, 1989) as if they were synonymous terms again leads to fuzzy terminology, mixing the genre (film) with the medium (TV, as opposed to cinema or DVD). It is my contention that AVT practices like dubbing, subtitling or voiceover are not merely variants of literary, drama or poetry translation, but rather that they are translational modes belonging to a superordinate text type – the audiovisual one – that operates in contradistinction to the written-only and the spoken-only types. This approach encompasses the potential situation of, for instance, a TV programme calling for the subtitling of a poem or the dubbing of a play for their release as part of an audiovisual production.

Skewed, traditional perceptions of AVT have somehow also led to the idea that the only cultural artefacts within AVT worthy of analysis and research – and for that matter, worthy of inclusion in publications for training purposes and in educational curricula – are fiction films. However, we only need to watch a bit of television, surf the internet, or peruse the DVD shelves of megastores to ascertain that there are many more genres and programmes that are also subtitled, dubbed or voicedover, and that these too deserve to be the object of scholarly analyses. Examples are sitcoms, cartoons, documentaries, corporate videos, commercials, educational and edutainment productions, video games, cookery and property programmes, interviews and fly-on-the-wall docudramas, to name but a few. It is evident that the way in which we interact has changed and is constantly changing still, the main move being that from the page to the screen as text carrier, and these changes in their turn create new communication needs. In this sense, the impressive development of technology has played a crucial role. In brief, we must view translation, and especially audiovisual translation as a more flexible, more heterogeneous phenomenon, one that is able to accommodate a broader range of empirical realities, to subsume new and potential translation activities within its boundaries and that therefore also calls for adapted research methods.

The seemingly ever-changing nature of translation and the difficulty of coping with it have also resulted in a certain amount of indecision regarding terminology. The first studies in our field tended to resort to terms like cinema translation and film translation (cf. supra) to name their research but as the field extended to include additional televised productions and those released on video, the term audiovisual translation was introduced. Another term that has enjoyed and is still enjoying a certain currency in the field is screen translation, designed to encompass all those programmes that are distributed via a screen, be it a television, cinema, computer or mobile screen. Although this terminological instability is yet another corroboration of the changeability of the field, it should by no means be considered a communication hurdle. On the contrary, it can just as well be considered a clear sign that many academics and scholars have maintained the open and accommodating stance that our changing times require, with a view to assimilating and acknowledging new developments in translation praxis, rather than squeezing them into old, respectable straightjackets.

What is more, the study of AVT has by now developed its very own theoretical and methodological approaches, allowing it to claim the status of a scholarly area of research in its own right. This new-found autonomy of AVT is evident in the fact that specific research frameworks have been developed for the study of dubbing and subtitling, for instance (Chaume Varela, 2004; Díaz Cintas, 2003a). In addition, and as I pointed out above, AVT has become the main topic of books, postgraduate courses and international conferences focusing on the specificity of this field. And yet, there also is this other side of the coin.

(Continues…)Excerpted from New Trends in Audiovisual Translation by Jorge Díaz Cintas. Copyright © 2009 Jorge Díaz Cintas and the authors of individual chapters. Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
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