scholarly journals Multilingual humour in audiovisual translation

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 209-220
Author(s):  
Noelia Marqués Cobeta
Keyword(s):  
Social Movement ◽  
Role Model ◽  
Central Element ◽  
Social Situation ◽  
Ethnic Communities ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Translation Process ◽  
Modern Family ◽  
Audiovisual Translation ◽  
Text Language

This commentary aims to take up the gauntlet thrown down by Dore (2019) with her article about multilingual humour in the Italian dubbed version of the series Modern Family. She suggested that the scenes included in the article could be analysed in other languages, so it was an interesting proposal to carry out the analysis of the Spanish dubbed version, since the L2 in the source text coincides with the target text language. Thus, this fact makes the translation process an arduous activity in these language combinations. Multilingualism is therefore considered the central element in this study. It is a reflection of the current social movement and the increase of multi-ethnic communities worldwide. This fact leads to citizens who use their knowledge to assert their own identity; as a consequence, audiovisual producers are also aware of this situation and exploit this phenomenon. Modern Family is an example of this reality and introduces characters, like Gloria Delgado-Pritchett, as a role model to show an increasingly common tendency, the use of multilingual and multi-ethnic characters that reflect this new social situation. Thanks to the selected examples, we will see whether the use of multilingualism as a source of humour is also transmitted to the Spanish dubbed version, as it did in the Italian dubbed version studied by the abovementioned scholar.

scholarly journals Multilingual humour in audiovisual translation. Modern Family dubbed in Italian

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margherita Dore
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Contextual Factors ◽  
Code Switching ◽  
Bicultural Identity ◽  
Ethnic Communities ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Modern Family ◽  
Audiovisual Translation

Audiovisual productions are increasingly featuring multi-ethnic communities which also reflect today’s globalised world. Characters in both films and TV series are often depicted as having a bilingual background and heavily relying on code-switching to express their bicultural identity (Monti 2016: 69). As such, this phenomenon poses important challenges for its translation, especially when dubbing is involved. Using this audiovisual translation (AVT) mode involves a necessary technical manipulation(Díaz-Cintas 2012: 284-285). As for Italian dubbing, multilingualism has often undergone a process of neutralization (Pavesi 2005: 56) or local standardization (Ulrych 2000: 410), although recent dubbed films have proved to be geared towards a more faithful rendering of this important feature of the source text (Monti 2016: 90).It should be borne in mind that contextual factors, such as genres, may play a fundamental role in deciding whether to retain or neutralise multilingualism in AVT, especially when it is used for humorous purposes. In those cases, the perlocutionary function of the ST should be considered (Hickey 1998; cf. also Zabalbeascoa 2012: 322). Comedy can make use of multilingualism to entertain and the American mockumentary (or docucomedy) Modern Family(Christopher Lloyd and Steven Levitan, 2009-2019), is a striking example in this sense. It follows the lives of Jay Pritchett and his family in suburban Los Angeles. Linguistically speaking, the most interesting character is Jay’s second wife Gloria Delgado, a young and beautiful Colombian woman who often code-switches or code-mixes English and Spanish (with a marked Colombian accent), thus creating moments of pure comedy. Hence, this study investigates how Gloria’s humorous and multilingual persona has been transferred into Italian. The analysis confirms the current tendency of Italian dubbing to render otherness in the TT (Monti 2016: 89). This may be justified by the genre and scope of the programme, that allow for a more innovative transfer of vernacular matching via what I propose to call functional manipulation.

Translating in a constrained environment

Babel ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Rędzioch-Korkuz
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Cultural Adaptation ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Translation Process ◽  
Text Type ◽  
Systemic Analysis ◽  
Vantage Points ◽  
Text Language ◽  
Point Of Departure

Abstract Translating children’s literature has been an object of interest researched from a number of vantage points, including the question of constraining factors. Scholars have highlighted mainly the question of dual readership or cultural adaptation, frequently without a global and systemic analysis of all impediments. This article examines the Polish translation of the German book for children, Katharina von der Gathen’s Klär mich auf, from a constraint-based framework. This article focuses on the reconstruction of the constraints in the translation process: the point of departure is the framework with three basic factors that constrain translation, i.e., the intention of the author/translator, text type, and the profile of the audience. The presented argumentation incorporates other formal impediments, such as the visual layer of the book and the semiotic make-up of the source text, language taboo and censorship or the literary polysystems. The analysis of the constraint framework helps to comprehend the translation in terms of the ST-TT relationship regarding their intended audiences, genre-related features, and the child-adult duality.

An exploration of poetological manipulation on Howard Goldblatt’s translation of Mo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hu Liu
Keyword(s):  
Original Work ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Translation Process ◽  
Intended Audience ◽  
English Writing ◽  
Life And Death

Abstract Drawing on André Lefevere’s rewriting theory, this paper explores how Howard Goldblatt translates Mo Yan’s novel Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (hereafter referred to as L&D) with regard to poetological manipulation. The paper analyses in detail how the translator rewrites the novel’s poetological features, including its unique linguistic, stylistic and narrative features, to produce a translation which is accessible to the intended audience. On the basis of this analysis, the paper identifies three characteristics of Goldblatt’s poetological rewriting: (1) macro-stylistic consistency with the source text, i.e. overall stylistic conformity to the original work; (2) simplification principle; (3) typical features of authentic English writing. The analysis reveals poetological manipulation in the translation process, from which we infer that rewriting in favour of the target poetological currents is the best way to achieve reader acceptance.

scholarly journals Slovak thinking on audiovisual translation and the issue of the second-hand translation of Russian documentary films

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Translation Studies ◽  
Russian Language ◽  
Documentary Films ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Historical Explanation ◽  
Cultural Space ◽  
Audiovisual Translation ◽  
The Russian Language ◽  
Limited Diffusion

The paper, in its first part, outlines the Slovak research into audiovisual translation (AVT) from the 1950s up to the present, paying attention to the most important scholars as well as publications that helped to shape and establish the discipline within Slovak translation studies. It is based on the ongoing bibliographical research and the historical explanation mapping the development of AVT research in Slovakia by I. Tyšš – e.g. his publication Myslenie o audiovizuálnom preklade na Slovensku: 1952 – 2017 (Thinking on Audiovisual Translation in Slovakia: 1952 – 2017, 2018) – as well as on own findings covering the last two years. In more detail, the first part of the paper highlights that it was primarily thanks to a younger generation of translation studies scholars – especially E. Perez (née Janecová), L. Paulínyová (née Kozáková) and J. Želonka – that in 2012 the Slovak research into AVT finally became systematic. The second part of the paper is devoted to the phenomenon of the so-called second-hand translation of originally Russian audiovisual works that may be observed in Slovakia in recent years. The questionable nature of this phenomenon is stressed since the Russian language is not a language of limited diffusion and definitely not remote in relation to the Slovak cultural space. On the example of two documentary films – Под властью мусора (Held Captive by Rubbish, 2013) and Дух в движении (Spirit in Motion, 2015), the author discusses and analyses the problems that occur when translating originally Russian AV works into Slovak through the English language, i.e. the negative shifts resulting from mis-/overinterpretation of the source text, translation by omission, wrong order of dialogues, cultural specifics and incorrect transcription.

scholarly journals Verbal Humour in Screen Translation: Officer Crabtree’s Case with the Fronch and Hungarian Longwodge

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 25-50
Author(s):  
Zsuzsanna Ajtony
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Fictional Character ◽  
Creative Solutions ◽  
Audiovisual Translation ◽  
Research Domain ◽  
Insight Into

AbstractThe present study aims to gain insight into the translation of audiovisual humour displayed in the verbal manifestations of Officer Crabtree, the fictional character in the BBC sitcom ‘Allo ‘Allo! (1982–1992), especially focusing on its Hungarian dubbed version of the series. Being a research domain with insights from audiovisual translation (AVT), humour studies, and discourse analysis, the article introduces the reader to AVT, more particularly, to dubbing, to research carried out in the domain of audiovisual humour, and to humour studies, especially focusing on incongruity and superiority theory. These theoretical elements are applied in the analysis of the corpus comprising the English voice track as source text (ST) and its Hungarian counterpart as target text (TT), highlighting the humorous effects achieved in both of them and especially pointing at the creative solutions translators resorted to in rendering the idiosyncratically mangled English texts into Hungarian. The analysis aims to provide counterexamples to the frequent claim that verbal humour is untranslatable.

scholarly journals A glossary as an explicative translation technique in the translation of the third culture elements

2021 ◽  
Vol 145 ◽  
pp. 129-144
Author(s):  
Michał Gąska
Keyword(s):  
Literary Translation ◽  
Cultural Barriers ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Third Culture ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Translation Process ◽  
East Indies ◽  
The Third ◽  
Translation Technique ◽  
Similarities And Differences

Utilising notes or glossaries in literary translation has both its opponents and supporters. While the former conceive it as a translator’s helplessness and failure, the latter defend it as a manner of overcoming cultural barriers. The present article aims to scrutinize glossaries used as an explicative translation technique with regard to the rendering of the third culture elements. The analysis is conducted on the basis of the novel by Dutch writer Hella S. Haasse: Sleuteloog, in which the action is set in the Dutch East Indies. For this reason, Indonesian culture occurs as the third culture in the translation process. The source text is juxtaposed with its translations into German and Polish in order to examine the similarities and differences in images of the third culture elements the glossaries evoke in the addressees of the target texts.

Accessing Bodies that Matter

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karolina Krasuska ◽  
Ludmiła Janion ◽  
Marta Usiekniewicz
Keyword(s):  
Social Norms ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
The Political ◽  
Original Publication ◽  
Linguistic Context ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Translation Process ◽  
Gendered Language

Abstract In this self-reflexive paper, co-written by scholars currently collaborating on the Polish translation of Judith Butler’s Bodies that Matter, we discuss the political and activist stakes of translating a canonical queer theory text over 25 years after its original publication, in the context of anti-lgbtq+ public discourse in today’s Poland. We argue that the collective character of our translation process turns it into an activist workshop that negotiates social norms and works on the invention and application of their alternatives. This activist practice results in a programmatically accessible translation, written in gender-inclusive and queer-sensitive language that follows the poststructuralist philosophical underpinnings of the 1993 source text and its gendered language. Discussing examples of Butler’s use of grammatical gender and her politicized style in our translation, the article contributes to understanding the queer activist practice of translation and, specifically, underwritten questions of translating queer theory in a contemporary Polish (linguistic) context.

A systems theory perspective on the translation process

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-232
Author(s):  
Michael Carl ◽  
Andrew Tonge ◽  
Isabel Lacruz
Keyword(s):  
Systems Theory ◽  
Dissipative Structures ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Translation Process ◽  
Gaze Patterns ◽  
Word Translation ◽  
Time And Energy ◽  
Translation Systems ◽  
Internal Order

Abstract The translation process has often been described as a sequence of three steps, source text (ST) analysis, source-target transfer, and target text (TT) generation. We propose a radically different view, in which the human translation process consists of a hierarchy of interacting word and phrase translations systems which organize and integrate as dissipative structures. Activation of word (or phrase) translation systems is a non-selective subliminal process in the translator’s mind not restricted to one language. Depending on the entropy (i.e., the internal order) of the word translation systems, a human translator spends more or less time and energy during the translation process, which can be measured in the form of gaze patterns and production duration.

scholarly journals SOVIETISMS IN “CHERNOBYL” MINISERIES: TRANSLATION AND LINGVOCULURAL ASPECTS

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (193) ◽  
pp. 117-122
Author(s):  
Kateryna Bondarenko ◽  
◽  
Olena Shapovalova ◽  
Sofia Balan ◽  
◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Age Groups ◽  
Original Version ◽  
Young Generation ◽  
Translation Process ◽  
Lexical Semantic ◽  
Audiovisual Translation ◽  
The Given ◽  
Ukrainian Society ◽  
Two Age Groups

The article examines the Sovietisms used in “Chernobyl” miniseries produced by HBO. Lexical semantic groups as sets of paradigmatically and semantically related lexical means are detected and analised. The key role in the text part of HBO’s miniseries “Chernobyl” produced by HBO is played by the nominations of Soviet authorities (23% of the researched Sovietisms), Soviet awards (7%), Soviet authorities’ positions (25%), NPP workers’ positions (9%), Soviet institutions and buildings (11%), Soviet phrases and slogans (25%). The article discusses the Sovietisms’ ambivalence as perceived by the representatives of post-Soviet countries and other lingvocultures. The Sovietisms’ identification in modern Ukrainian society is checked through a survey of 40 respondents of two age groups: the generation that was born in post-Soviet independent Ukraine (aged from 14 to 25) and older generation, people who were born and lived in USSR (aged from 37 to 65). The results of the survey show that older generations identify the Soviet realia clearer than young generation that recognizes only up to 51% sovietisms. These issues include, but are not restricted to, the reception of the given audiovisual methods, techniques and transformations, and the different ways in which the translation process is accomplished in different countries. The data obtained must be thoroughly considered when adapting audiovisual products for different audiences. The main means of the Sovietisms’ adaptation for English (original) version of the miniseries contextual interpretation (84%) and transliteration (16%). The discussion of the study will contribute to assessing the potential multinational studies in audiovisual translation, thus offering indications on future methodological developments and enabling more detailed and structured comparisons. The material analysed in the article can be used for adaptation of audiovisual products for the Ukrainian audience and for tourist services’ improvement, including accompanying foreign tourists to the Chornobyl Zone.

scholarly journals Foreignization and domestication strategies in cultural term translation of tourism brochures

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 171
Author(s):  
Choirul Fuadi
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
The Other ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Translation Process ◽  
Translation Strategies ◽  
Central Java ◽  
Cultural Terms ◽  
Analysis Strategy ◽  
Qualitative Descriptive ◽  
Special Region

<p>In translating brochure, a translator has to make a decision on the basis of the message and purpose. The translator is faced by two strategies of translation – foreignization and domestication. The purpose of the study is to examine how the interrelationship between cultural term translation and foreignization or domestication strategy in the cultural term translation of tourism brochure from Indonesian into English. This study used qualitative descriptive with discourse analysis strategy. The note-taking technique is used to identify and classify the data. The objects of the study are tourism brochures from Province of Special Region of Yogyakarta and Central Java in 2015. The findings show that the translation strategies used depend on the translation process. When the cultural terms are familiar, translator tends to use domestication strategy and consider the target text. Translator chooses domestication strategy because try to make tourist understand the text and produce communicative and natural translation. On the other hand, when cultural terms are foreign, translator using foreignization strategy and consider source text. Using foreignization strategy, translator tends to introduce traditional cultural term.</p>

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