Lingua inglese 4BIS

Lingua inglese 4BIS

Susan Bassnett is one of the most prominent figures in translation studies (born in 1945, scholar of comparative literature).

The translator as a cross-cultural mediator

The translator not only is a mediator between the source language (SL) and the target language (TL), but also a mediator between two cultures: source culture and target culture.

Translation in the 21st century

Characterised by a growing interest in translation due to global changes:

• Mass migration: Moving to a new country, it is vital to learn the local language.
• Attacks of 9/11: War against terror.
• Conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan (more in general in the Middle Eastern countries).
• Global warming: Necessity for all the countries to communicate with one another.
• Expansion of global communication systems: Internet allows us to communicate with people all over the world.

Translation has become an instrument: Translators are a necessity to gain access to languages we don’t know.

Origins of the field

• Cicero was one of the first to assert that translation is a communicative activity which involves the transfer of information across linguistic boundaries. He had already distinguished between:
  • Word for word translation: Literal translation in which the sense is obscured (to his way of thinking).
  • Sense-for-sense translation hasn’t been resolved. This is a debate which has been going on for ages and still continues.
• Eugene Nida claims that context is essential for a translator: A language cannot be understood outside its culture, without taking into consideration in which it was born. The language is a vital part of the culture of a nation. He wrote a book called “Customs and Culture”; an example of the Congolese who thought that dresses which covered breasts were typical of prostitutes who had money to spend on clothes.

Faithfulness to a source

This debate has been going on since the ‘600; a lot of figurative language was utilised to explain this matter:

• Like women: Beautiful and unfaithful or ugly and faithful.
• Like women and slaves were to be subordinate to their masters: Translation is subordinate to the original text, it is therefore an inferior product. The product we have is not a faithful replica of the original product.

1960s: How much can we allow a translator to be creative? Can we diverge and how much? Catford (1965) distinguishes between linguistic and cultural untranslatability:

• Linguistic: No lexical or syntactic equivalent in the TL.
• Cultural: More loosely formulated; no equivalent situational feature in the TL. For example, the idea of “bathroom” in three different cultures: French, Italian, Japanese. The word exists in all these cultures, but the idea conveyed is really different.

Translation studies as an independent field

Over the decades, translation studies have taken in not only a linguistic problem, but also had to take in other fields of study: historical, anthropologic, political, etc.

We have to consider who is going to see the product, but also the chronological history of the product, the sociological or political elements that the translator needs to know before working on it. Lawrence Venuti, a prominent figure in translation, says that the illusion of fluency (= the impression that a product has not been translated at all) marginalises the translator’s role and renders him invisible. The greater the fluency, the more the translator is marginalised.

If we confront a text with cultural bumps, where the translation is fluent and the product is transformed to be adapted to the TC, it’s like “looking through a glass.” The movie we're looking at is perceived as something created in our own culture, because it’s so well done, it is perceived as something local. The translator is invisible, hence he should emphasize his presence in the final product. He welcomes cultural bumps.

• Bassnett and Lefevre: They have both worked on the impact of translation on a given culture. History of colonialism is a history of translation; Treaty of Witangi (1840). Translation can be a really dangerous instrument and activity, it has to be done properly and the context has to be taken into consideration, especially in war zones. The translator is not only bilingual but is also bicultural.

Audiovisual translation

Abbreviations:

• AVT = Audiovisual Translation
• CS = Culture Specific
• CSR = Cultural Specific Reference = Element which can be found in a certain culture but not in another one
• SA = Source Audience
• SC = Source Culture
• SL = Source Language
• TA = Target Audience
• TC = Target Culture
• TL = Target Language
• TT = Target Text

Audiovisual materials (AVMS) = Non-book materials renewed and recent, unlike books. We’re dealing with very recent material. It can be downloaded, they have a huge impact on our lives. This field of study is very recent, but the creation of audiovisual material dates to the 1800s. “Train Pulling into a Station” by Lumiere Brothers.

Whenever we see something which is audio-visually made, we have an emotional response.

Affective response

The response of the audience towards an audiovisual product, driven by the emotions conveyed. Many have criticised the filmmaking:

• Leavis: The motion pictures made active recreation and use of mind more difficult. Movies were cancelling critical thinking.
• Mann: People could react, but not reflect.

During the last 15 years, AVT has been the fastest growing strand of translation studies; we are always looking for an emotional response in front of a product, firstly thanks to technological progress; communication technology has become part of our lives. This expansion can be traced through terminological changes:

1. Film dubbing or film translation: 1970s
2. Film and TV translation: 1980s
3. Screen translation and media translation: Switch from cinemas to TVs: mid-1980s
4. Constrained translation, transadaptation, transcreation (2000s)

Modalities of AVT

• Subtitling: Snippets or pieces of written texts superimposed on visual footage conveying a target language version of the source speech. The subtitling we see today is way more refined and evolved if compared to the initial one.
• Intertitles: Piece of written text inserted in the middle of a photographed action.
• Dialogue intertitles: Used to convey the dialogue (in the beginning, the films were silent).
• Expository intertitles: Provide descriptive or narrative material so that the audience understands what’s going on in the scene or what’s going to happen.

Subtitles are an example of diasemiotic intermodal forms of AVT: We have a shift from spoken to written media (= diasemiotic = 2 semiotic modes / intermodal = we go from one mode to the other). People speak way faster than they read; subtitling affects the perception of the product. Subtitles can only accommodate 60% of the source spoken text, it cannot be as long as the original dialogue, as it would be impossible for the viewer to read all the lines. Who decides what to eliminate? The AV translator.

In communities where there are different languages coexisting, we can have bilingual subtitles, where two languages are shown (sometimes also three).

Condensation and synthesis: Compromise the interpersonal pragmatics of subtitles dialogue; as we have to shorten the sentences, the original meaning is compromised. The relationship between the author and the audience is compromised by the translation of the dialogues. The AV translator has to undo any ambiguity that there may be in the movie, even if the author wanted it to be there and clear.

There are many rules for the subtitling activity, which really compromises the creativity of the translator; sometimes they willingly break these rules: Vietnamese film director Trinh T. Minh-ha.

Very fast development of digitalisation techniques: New models of distribution and consumption; it’s easier for all of us to get this material. Fansubbing community helps the process of circulation of new materials. All of us have the ability to join the process of transformational practices (activities that allow to transform something in oral form to visual form). All of the limitations of subtitling conventions are exposed by the fansubbing communities, which go against them, rendering the product in their own way.

• Fansubbing = Fan + Subtitling: While Japanese animes experienced the boom in the last decades, their history begins in the 1910s in the country. They were initially influenced by Disney products which were very popular in the US.

Animes were famous only in Japan for a period, and it was difficult for them to be seen overseas; the only reason why they got in Europe was thanks to the activity of the fansub communities. They didn’t have the technologies we have today, and the materials were physically sent from Japan. Now we have programs we can use to carry out fansubbing. They can carry out the translation in their own way:

• Different colours per different characters.
• They can add translator’s notes on the image.
• They reject localisation because they want to keep the product as original as possible, maybe keeping foreign words that need to be explained.
• Double subtitling, different languages appearing also in the middle of the image.

Fansubbing in Italy

It didn’t start with Disney or anime, but with other types of products: Star Trek; the episodes took a long time to come out in Italy and fans didn’t want to wait that long. The fansubbing community got the original version from the US and started working on it.

Audiovisual translation as a site of representational practice

Representational practice = Filmmaking, which represents a determined culture of a certain country.

Representational practices in AVT

In the 1940s and 1950s, a particular genre was born in the US: western. It became really popular in the States; John Wayne represented the typical American idea of a cowboy self-made man, not coming from a rich family but capable of doing something with his life. There was the contrasting idea of good: cowboys; and bad: Indians. Gave us the idea of the Old Wild West.

Spaghetti Western: Sergio Leone + Ennio Morricone. Different from the American western; the protagonist is never a hero, more often an anti-hero, moved by different motivations and ideals. It is not optimistic nor moralistic and almost always presents money as the only real interest of the character. The protagonist moves only because something is beneficial. The scenes are more violent and crude with no love stories or long discussion among characters. The characters look more real and the action is sometimes extreme. The distinction between good and bad is blurred: stylistic revolution by Sergio Leone who decided to part from the American ideal, presenting new types of characters, who are sometimes bad and even more realistic.

The settings are quite similar, often shoots happened in Spain where there is a similar environment. The villages we see in the spaghetti western appear to be ugly and desolated. The image is less epic and much harsher than the American vision of the West.

They were dubbed during post-production; the budget was really low and couldn’t afford to apply synchronised sound. They shot the scenes with all the noises other than the actor voices, also those elements which didn’t belong to the diegetic scene. The movie was dubbed during post-production; multilingual type of film; some of the actors were not Italian and acted in their own language. As the movie had to be produced also for the American public, they dubbed the movie in post-production. Sergio Leone challenged Hollywood’s synchronic diegetic sound idea and stated that the voice of the actors were not important, the story and its development were. Also, music was vital.

How can we circulate different ideas, ideals, and ways of life? Depending on where the film was made, we have the same genre with two different representational practices. In the formative years of filmmaking and audiovisual translation, we have a complex interweaving of ideological, artistic, and economic factors. Films are able to build ethnic-, class-, and gender-based identities; we render available to different countries different ideals and concepts. AVT practices these representations.

Silent films

They rely on visual semiotic to construct an experience of artistic expression for audiences. Early cinema productions were silent and stories had to be narrated by visual means. The actor’s only resource was his own body Acting; pantomimic: every gesture was really accentuated as they had to compensate the lack of words. The visual part was translating the feelings of the actors.

Fixed iconography

Every gesture was iconographic, they were the same in every film.

• Ex. If the scene was set in a home, there was a checkered tablecloth, which indicated a poor but honest person.
• Ex. Before kissing a man, a woman always came close and fixed his tie, and her leg went up as they were kissing in a really passionate embrace.
• Ex. If you saw a wife pouring coffee in her husband’s cup, that meant a happy marriage that was to be challenged soon.

Presentationalism

Film directors found ways to make it easier for people to understand:

• They showed general kind of locations, that everyone was familiar with.
• Never set in a specific historical time.

They were still pretty hard to understand and experimentation started to take place to facilitate the audience:

• Live narration by in-house commentators: People standing by the screen and trying to explain the story.
• Talking pictures: Actors standing on stage delivering spoken dialogue matching the images that were being shown. The people delivering the dialogues changed every time and the dialogue was not written down, it changed every time. Movie owners who were richer could hire better people; varying quality of dialogue. They were not universally adopted by the distributors as they were expensive.

Shift from presentationalism to diegesis

A diegetic film shows what happens to the character, whatever is happening on the screen is happening to the characters. Directors started using on-screen texts or intertitles to orient viewers. The film industry started to put down some rules that placed control over the reception of the text; it was in the hands of the producers and creators rather than exhibitors. Standardization of intertitles allowed a uniformity of information that was suitable for mass production and consumption; they were easier to translate and hence sell to other countries.

Talking films and synchronised sound

We start hearing in the 1930s people speaking; image, voice, music could be used as representational resources. New priority: Achievement of maximum synchrony between different expressive resources.

Sound synchronisation completely changed the history of cinema but created some problems:

• They had to synchronise many elements together.
• They had to achieve a standardization of relationship between scene and voice; whatever was shown had to match the voice and was being said. Film producers had to follow the same rules.

It was not an easy transition due to many factors.

1929: The jazz singer was the first proper talkie but it included only 15 min of standard sounds. Talkies were at first unpopular with audiences and filmmakers:

• They had elevated costs.
• Risk of alienated the audiences; it wouldn’t be easy for them to understand as they were used to just see what was going on, without hearing the sounds.
• Silent films had a universal language; no translation was necessary to show a silent film in other countries, while with talkies, translation is necessary.
• They imposed temporal restrictions; words needed time to be spoken.

There was a big concern to use this new potential but at the same time had to cope with all the problems; they had to be capable to achieve the multidimensional process of semiotic blending: image + words + noise + music, etc. With other semiotic elements to be translated, it was quite difficult for the film industry to go along with the changes and they started experimenting to satisfy the foreign demand.

Multiple-language version film (MLV): Version of the same movie, reshot in several different languages, with different actors speaking different languages. Doubling: Everything was reacted in different language, recorded in post-production and then applied to the footage. This is what allowed American producers to regain a big market share as they sold a huge amount of productions in Europe.

Silent films: Talking films once the products started to be sold abroad there was a clash between cultural and political values represented in American films and those of the importing countries.

• Freedom to become whatever we like: Western film.
• Democratic policy.

The European countries were importing other ideals, that were far from theirs.

• Totalitarian regimes: Fascism, Nazism, communism, etc.; these American ideals did not fit in the importing countries and had to be censored.
• Protectionist measure to preserve their national ideals and film industries. Film companies in Europe started forming alliances to face competition from the US and favour exchange of material between them. Italy mainly with Germany and Spain as they had a similar political background.
• Subtitling and dubbing were used to censor certain parts of the dialogues and kinda control what was being shown.

Lip-synchronised dubbing was the preferred option in countries with a single linguistic community; achieve linguistic uniformity. The minority languages gradually diminished as the film industry opted for one standard language.