Volume 38, Issue 5 - Special Issue: Audiovisual Translation as intercultural mediation, Guest Editors: Marie-Noëlle Guillot, Maria Pavesi and Louisa Desilla

This article addresses a question central for this special issue of Multilingua on audiovisual translation (AVT) – of the relationship between the cross-cultural and the intercultural in audiovisual translation. The question underpins fundamental debates in the emergent field of AVT as cross/intercultural mediation, the focus in this volume, with subtitling and dubbing the two main interlingual modes considered in its pages from an interdisciplinary perspective embracing translation and audiovisual translation studies, pragmatics and cross-cultural pragmatics and film studies. The article doubles up as the introduction for the special issue, and provides its rationale and contents.

This article focuses on linguistic and cultural representation in AVT as a medium of intercultural literacy. It has two objectives: it puts to the test increasingly accepted assumptions about AVT modalities’ distinctive meaning potential and expressive capacity, with a case study of communicative practices in their representation, via AVT, in subtitles across Romance and Germanic languages. The second objective is to make a start on a neglected question to date, by considering, concurrently, the respective potential for representation of different types of languages, Indo-European in the first instance, in different pair configurations. The study applies to (Romance) French, Italian, Spanish and (Germanic) English and German and uses a cross-cultural pragmatics framework to explore representation, per se and comparatively across the languages represented in the main data, Lonnergan’s 2016 feature film Manchester by the Sea. Data is approached qualitatively from a target text end in the first instance and primarily, in a subset of scenes from across the film. Quantitative analysis is used complementarily for diagnostic purposes or as a complementary source of evidence, with initial focus on types of features identified in earlier studies as a locus of stylised representation in subtitling with evidence of distinctive pragmatic indexing (e.g. pronominal address, greetings, thanking). The study is a pilot study and is exploratory at this stage, but part of a broader endeavour to inform debates about, and build up the picture of, AVT as cross-cultural mediation and, ultimately, promote our understanding of films in translation’s societal impact.

This theoretical paper adopts the point of view of the audience of subtitled films and outlines a theory of subtitles as communicative agents within the participation structures of film reception. Based on examples from three Swiss fiction films – Heidi (2015) , Heimatland (2015) and Der Goalie bin ig (2014) – the following communicative effects are found and illustrated: uniformity, authorisation, foregrounding, aestheticisation, foreignisation. These effects are conceptualised in terms of Constitutive Communication theory and textual agency (Cooren. 2004. Textual agency: How texts do things in organizational settings. Organization 11(3). 373–393. doi:10.1177/1350508404041998), which describe that by communicating with audiences, subtitles animate into being other participants in film discourse and contribute to what viewers take away in terms of characters, stories, the cultural aspects they represent and the source culture(s) from which the text is perceived to communicate.

The codification of propriety – talking with a ‘proper’ accent – is recorded in audiovisual texts so that cross-cultural interaction between social groups is not left to verbal dialogue alone but to more or less accurate visual cues and to paralinguistic as well as prosodic information. This chapter will examine scenes from various audiovisual texts, which feature characters speaking with a British received pronunciation – arguably, the ‘proper’ accent – in contrast to those who speak with a variety of British accents. The main purpose of these narratives is the portrayal of a sociolinguistic divide, either to provide a realistic account of problematic or potentially inflammatory culture clashes or as stereotypical means to elicit a humorous response. The problem of transferring information related to such a linguistic and social gap in audiovisual translation has long been recognised as one of the most difficult challenges translators have to deal with. The examples quoted in this article, all related to the dubbing mode of translation, will, however, illustrate how prosodic and suprasegmental features can travel cross-culturally and could be, and sometimes are, taken into account by translators and adapters to maintain the linguistic contrast observed in the originals.

Insults are prototypical means to express impoliteness in social interactions. In film they are prime ways of staging conflict or jocular abuse, reflecting everyday communicative practices while contributing to the emotionality of dialogue, characterisation and plot advancement. Both original and dubbed films offer a privileged perspective to investigate the codification of impoliteness within and across linguacultures. In this contribution, we hypothesise that cross-cultural mediation in dubbing arises from hybridisation, a product of the contact between source and target language. Drawing on a parallel and comparable corpus of original and dubbed films, the study focuses on two major categories of insults and explores contrastively their overall frequency, the distinction between genuine and mock impoliteness and the structural complexity of forms. A degree of comparability is observed across Anglophone, Italian and dubbed Italian films, although distinctive trends also emerge from the corpus analysis. If Italian films globally make more frequent use of insults, Anglophone films stand out for their greater reliance on mock impoliteness and greater elaboration of forms. Dubbed films tend to position midway, reproducing source language patterns, while also partaking distinguishing lexico-grammatical traits of the target language. The results substantiate the function dubbing serves in cross-cultural mediation by activating an array of frames of reference that allow the new receiving audiences to experience foreign communication practices from their native language perspective.

In original and dubbed film dialogue, direct questions are a means to depict interpersonal relationships on screen. In particular, pragmatic questions (i.e. non-questioning, rhetorical interrogatives) are frequently employed to mark alignment among interactants, in the form of affiliative and disaffiliative interrogatives, respectively expressing positive and negative stance. Based on the exploration of the Pavia Corpus of Film Dialogue , the current study aims at investigating the ways in which affiliative and disaffiliative questions are constructed in original English filmic speech and in Italian dubbing. The two dialogue types show rather high similarity in the distribution of pragmatic questions – with a notable prevalence of disaffiliative interrogatives carrying conflict-initiating role. However, different strategies are privileged in the two languages for the linguistic construction of stance. The English source text does not rely on a single and specific pattern to signal affiliation, while it marks disaffiliation through inserts, emotionally-loaded chunks and non-canonical word order in the interrogative. Conversely, dubbed Italian frequently draws on weak connectors to express disalignment and prefers different types of syntactically marked structures in the construction of affiliation. Findings thus suggest a certain degree of autonomy for dubbed dialogue in the selection of specific linguistic markers to transfer and re-portray interpersonal relationships in the target linguaculture.

This article examines the construal, cross-cultural relay and comprehension of misunderstandings by filmmakers, translators and audiences respectively of Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004). It reports on findings of a case-study on implicatures in these two romantic comedies (Desilla 2009/2012/2014). Both genuine and feigned misunderstandings are found in the two films. Inter alia , the analysis will show that misunderstandings can serve comedic and/or narrative functions, the latter pertaining to both characterisation and, more crucially, plot advancement. It is also demonstrated how misunderstandings can permeate only a single layer or both layers of film communication.

In a market dominated by Hollywood, it is easy to overlook that the number of films (and televised productions) which are not in English is actually by far greater than those in English. However, although some non-English language film industries are vast, only a comparatively small number of productions are screened outside of their country of origin. Therefore, before being translated and brought to screens for us to watch, already a filter applies, as the films are chosen by curators of film festivals or the industry. For that reason, films that are perhaps less representative but more interesting, or by a well-known director may be chosen over others that may have been more successful in their country of origin, but are made by a less-well know director or perceived to be less interesting for ‘foreign audiences’. The choice of what we watch is thus never entirely ours. Using Japan, Germany and the UK as example, I will offer some thoughts on what impact such a filter might have on the consumption, and therefore the perception, of a film outside of its country of origin and what challenges this poses for audiences and researchers.