Linguistic and Cultural Representation in Audiovisual Translation

Irene Ranzato, Serenella Zanotti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351976381
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This collection of essays offers a multi-faceted exploration of audiovisual translation, both as a means of intercultural exchange and as a lens through which linguistic and cultural representations are negotiated and shaped. Examining case studies from a variety of media, including film, television, and video games, the volume focuses on different modes of audiovisual translation, including subtitling and dubbing, and the representations of linguistic and stylistic features, cultural mores, gender, and the translation process itself embedded within them. The book also meditates on issues regarding accessibility, a growing concern in audiovisual translation research. Rooted in the most up-to-date issues in both audiovisual translation and media culture today, this volume is essential reading for students and scholars in translation studies, film studies, television studies, video game studies, and media studies.

Part I

Representing Linguacultures

1 Translational Routines in Dubbing

Taking Stock and Moving Forwards

Maria Pavesi (Università di Pavia)

1. Formulaicity in Audiovisual Dialogue

The film Locke (Steven Knight 2013) is an archetypical representation of the centrality of dialogue in film. The film is a car journey, and the story is narrated through the only visible protagonist’s telephone conversations and monologues. By switching to the Italian translation, one is struck by the profusion of formulas that have come to be associated with the language of dubbing from English into Italian, such as tutto qui ‘that’s all’, buona fortuna ‘good luck’, va tutto bene? ‘are you okay?’, voglio fare la cosa giusta ‘I want to do the right thing’, non posso crederci ‘I can’t believe it’. Formulas, however, are not only restricted to the translated version of the film but also characterize the original English version where fixed expressions such as something’s come up, I can’t get out of it, do you want a word?, guess what? intersperse the whole dialogue.

Formulaicity, a universal feature of language, in audiovisual (AV) dialogue arises from several motivations. First, as fictive orality in films and television programmes is meant to represent and evoke the language of face-to-face communication, scripting conventions draw on ritualized and reiterated conversational routines. These perform a mimetic function, both as illocutionary speech acts and discourse-organizing formulas (Quaglio 2009; Bednarek 2010; Pavesi 2016a). Second, conventions of scriptwriting also include reliance on recurrent patterns, key words and repetitions deployed to create cohesion within the film, differentiate characters and reinforce a leitmotif (Kozloff 2000: 84–85). The fixed expression forget about it, for example, is immortalized in the film Donnie Brasco (Mike Newell 1997), where it functions as an in-group, polyfunctional conversational routine typifying the mafiosi’s speech. More recently, research has also highlighted the frequency of phraseological clusters that perform a specific role diegetically (Freddi 2011). Expressions such as what do you mean and what are you doing repeatedly convey antagonism and challenge, working as powerful engines of narrative advancement in films as well as in television series (Bednarek 2010). Finally, from a telecinematic point of view, the conventional and predictable linguistic patterns found in AV dialogue mirror the repetitiveness and predictability of the situations represented on screen (Taylor 2008; Quaglio 2009): formulas of greeting and leave-taking, for example, pervade Anglophone films and television series as a result of the frequency with which characters meet and take leave from each other in the fictional multimodal world (Bonsignori et al. 2012, 2014).

But formulaicity has also been recognized as a key feature of translated AV texts (e.g. Maraschio 1982; Pavesi 1994, 2005, 2008; Chaume 2001; Bucaria and Chiaro 2007; Bucaria 2008). Mutatis mutandis and pace Herbst (1995),¹ there is no reason to exclude the language of dubbing from reliance on the idiom principle posited by Sinclair for language production (1991). Given the repeated communicative events represented on screen, translators are expected to make their selections out of a pre-determined set of “semi-preconstructed phrases that constitute single choices” (Sinclair 1991: 110), thus relying on less costly automatic or semi-automatic behaviour. Audiovisual translation (AVT), moreover, is supposed to mimic the formulaic nature of both conversation and AV speech, inheriting this dimension from the source text and the target language. From the original scripts, dubbed dialogues take over the ritualized sequences that characterize verbal exchange on screen, as with formulas of greetings, leave takings, introductions and good wishes that in the target texts mirror those found in the original versions (cf. Bonsignori et al. 2012; Bonsignori and Bruti 2016). AVT, at the same time, recreates patterns of prefabricated orality drawing on the repetitive units typical of spontaneous conversation. Such transfer is exemplified by formulaic questions and formulaic clefts, borrowed into Italian dubbing from Italian conversation (Ghia 2014; Pavesi 2005, 2016a).

From a procedural point of view, the repetitiveness of dubbing may be further amplified by routinization processes that invest the different phases of the translation process. The results of such routinization procedures have been called translational routines and defined as “recurrent solutions to translation problems which tend to become overextended” in time (Pavesi 2008: 94, also 1994: 136–138). Their similarity to routines in language use and language acquisition have also been stressed, pointing out that what distinguishes translational routines from other formulas in language production is their cross-linguistic import. Translational routines do not primarily apply to the correspondence between communicative situations and holistic expressions in a specific language, but rather pertain to the systematic correspondences between two languages once a similarity has been identified in the form, meaning or use of given linguistic expressions across lingua-cultural divides.

In the remainder of this chapter, attention will be paid to such repeated and intertextual discourse in translated AV dialogue, concentrating on features of orality. After introducing routinization in translation, in the following sections, translational routines will be examined with a view to clarifying their nature, bringing to light the mechanisms that guide their evolution and placing them within the context of AV dialogue as a representation of conversational language. The exemplification will draw both on published literature and the Pavia Corpus of Film Dialogue (PCFD)—a unidirectional parallel and comparable corpus at present comprising 24 American and British films dubbed into Italian and 15 original Italian films. We will argue that although many translational routines are straightforward calques that through reiteration become endemic in the language of dubbing, the phenomenon is much wider and includes overextensions that depart from one-to-one, source-language and target-language correspondences. In the conclusion, the collocation of routinization within the space of dubbing and its implications for both dubbing agents and audiences will be discussed.

2. Routinization in Translation

The hypothesis of routinization advanced for AVT is in line with observations made about translation in general. Gusmani (1983: 14–15) noticed that, once translators have established a given correspondence between expressions in the two languages, they find it natural to reproduce it every time they encounter the same expressions. Similarly, both Toury (1995/2012) and Gellerstam (2005) argued that one translation solution may come to be preferred over other available options when transferring texts from one language into another. Talking of stock equivalents (1995: 97–101), Toury defines them as automatic responses repeatedly produced when translators encounter the same source-language item or sequence.

[T]he connection established between source- and target-language segments during an act of translation does not necessarily dissolve when the act is over […]. Rather, it often leaves more or less permanent imprints in the translator’s mind.

(Toury 1995: 99, emphasis added)

The pairings of source-language and target-language items with time become entrenched in the translator’s memory, and if other translators start reproducing these individually created pairs, the replacement of a segment in the source language with another equivalent segment in the target language will take on a shared and social dimension, developing into a translational norm.² In a similar vein, Gellerstam (2005) has conceptualized repeated transfer solutions as leaving “fingerprints in translations”, with many recurrent equivalents setting translated language aside, since translators’ choices often fall on unusual language items of the target language.³

Importantly, routinization in translation can converge with the intrinsic formulaicity of given text types as with technical texts calling for greater use of ready-made units.

Translators, like monolingual communicators under conditions of stress (e.g. football commentators), will inevitably and necessarily rely on automatic strategies and use ready-made units, helping them to cope with time constraints (and meet deadlines) and, at the same time, to achieve the expected degree of routinization in the target text.

(Heltai 2004: 59, emphasis added)

As hinted earlier, AV language is a specialized genre, characterized by a high degree of formulaicity related to both the mimetic and diegetic import of fictive orality.⁴ At the same time dubbing is affected by synchronization constraints that severely limit translators’ choices and trigger the influence of the source language/source text on the final output (Pavesi 2016b). The construct of dubbese—or translationese more generally—is indeed rooted in the relationship between routinization and interference, which supposedly gives way to unnatural and artificial translation outcomes (cf. Antonini 2008; Bucaria 2008 among many).

3. Translational Routines as Calques

With reference to their association with source-language influence, in the literature on dubbing, translational routines are often made to overlap with calques—i.e. literal translations of individual expressions. Illustrating various calques, Herbst (1995: 263–264) pointed out that “[t]hese examples are of course not in any way significant in themselves as single instances of mistranslations but only important as being relatively typical of dubbed language” (emphasis added). Alfieri et al. (2010: 157, 160) similarly observed the influx of “expressive stereotypes” as syntactic and phraseological calques deriving from “immediate equivalences” between English and Italian in the translation of American television series, especially in the 1980s. Pavesi (1994, 2005, 2008, 2016a) suggested that translational routines originate from reiterated translational solutions modelled on the source language, whilst Bucaria (2008: 154) spoke of them as “words and phrases heavily influenced by the source language”.

Lists and inventories of such conventional and norm-creating calques have been put forward for various dubbed languages. German was initially investigated by Herbst (1994, 1995) and Whitman-Linsen (1992), who were among the first scholars to provide in-depth and extended treatments of the phenomenon. As for Italian, we move from Menarini’s pioneering work in the 1950s, to find Rossi’s contribution (e.g. 2007), together with those of several other authors (Bollettieri Bosinelli 2002; Pavesi 2005; Bucaria 2008; Minutella 2015; Motta 2015). Spanish dubbing language has been widely investigated, with Gómez Capuz (2001) having produced the most thorough description and account of Anglicisms in one single language of dubbing from English (cf. also Chaume and García de Toro 2001; Duro Moreno 2001, among others). Calques, like loans, offer ready-made solutions to isochrony problems, especially when speaking time must be covered up whether or not a functional or pragmatic equivalent is available in the target language (Pavesi and Perego 2006). Synchronization, however, does not explain all cases in which these routines are used. Romero Fresco (2009) showed that in Spanish, such reiterated translation...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: If You Can’t See It, You Can’t Be It: Linguistic and Cultural Representation in Audiovisual Translation
• Part I Representing Linguacultures
• Part II Representational Practices Across Different AVT Modes
• Part III Representing Otherness
• Part IV Representing Multilingual Soundscapes
• Part V Representing Voice
• Part VI Representing Translation
• List of Contributors
• Index