Lingua Inglese, curriculum orientale - Appunti

REVOKING 'Revoicing'

'Revoicing' is a generic term encompassing a range of spoken translation methods, including simultaneous interpreting, freecommentary, narration, voice-over and lip-synchronized dubbing.

Simultaneous interpreting

Simultaneous interpreting is a live versioning method used to translate films or documentaries in settings where more elaborate forms of revoicing are not an option, typically due to time or funding constraints (ex. Film festivals). The interpreter, who may occasionally have to perform without accessing the relevant script, normally dubs the voices of the whole film cast.

Consecutive interpreting

In consecutive interpreting, the person on the screen speaks a language and then we have a consecutive interpretation. There is no written script, but it is different from simultaneous interpreting because there are no overlapping voices.

Free commentary

Free commentary is a revoicing technique performed on the spot by presenters or commentators broadcasting a high

profile event. It‘is clarly an adaptation of the original voice track content for a new audience, with additions, omissions, classifications and comments’ (Gambier 2003). Delivered with a spontaneous tone, free commentary rarely aims to convey a faithful rendering of the original speech. The commentator is out the diagetic world and usually ads informations, giving something extra to the audience.

Narration is a live or pre-recorded form of oral transfer aiming ‘to provide a summarized but faithful and carefully scripted rendition of the original speech’. Normally ‘its delivery is timed so that there is no clash with the visual syntax of the programme’ (Perez-Gonzalez 2009), as defined by the structural organization and the transitions between the constitutive units of the audiovisual texts.

The audience hears someone speaking who is neither a character or part of the diagetic world. The narration is used when the director wants to preserve the

crude language of the book (in case of films inspirated by books).

3Voice-over

In voiced-over or 'half-dubbed' material, the original and translated soundtracks co-exist and overlap. Typically, only the original voice is audible at the beginning. A few seconds into the programme, however, the volume of the source dialogue or narration is lowered, while the translated voice track becomes acoustically salient until the end.

Voice-over is conventionally used for the translation of televised interviews, documentaries and other forms of audiovisual content where lip-synchronization is not the essence.

The geographical dispersion of the voice-over practises has brought to variation in the way in which this audiovisual transfer method is actually executed in each market. For example, in Poland voice-over narrators or lektors provide a 'whispering' translation, thus allowing the audience to hear the original voices to the greatest extent possible. By contrast, in Iran,

wherevoice-over was originally used to revoice both Iranian and foreign films, the narrator's acting tends to be contagious and exuberant.

FUNSUBBING

Recent changes in the audiovisual landscape brought to the development of digitization techniques and new models of distribution and consumption of audiovisual products, which have provided the spread of transformational practices.

Fansubbing in the subtitling of television drama and films by networked fan communities. It seeks to redress the shortage and cultural insensitivity of commercial translations. Fansubbers produce and distribute their own subtitled versions through Intert-based channels and, in so doing, provide their fellow fans with a more 'authentic' and meaningful spectatorial experience.

Sometimes, groups of politically engaged amateurs used subtitling to undermine the socio-economic structures the sustain global capitalism and/or to effect social and political change.

Anime fansubbing: Fansubbing in Italy 4ASSISTNE

Over the last two decades, audiovisual translation has contributed to enhancing the social integration of minorities all over the world.

• It helped immigrants to develop their skills in the language spoken by their host communities.
• With the emergence and consolidation of relatively new forms of intersemiotic assistive mediation, such as subtitling for the hard of hearing or audio description for the blind, it facilitates access to information and entertainment for sensory impaired members of the community.

Real-time subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing (respeaking)

Real-time subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing, often known as respeaking, is a technique in which a respeaker listens to the original sound of a live programme or event and respeaks it, including punctuation marks and some specific features for the deaf and hard of hearing audience, to a speech recognition software, which turns the recognized utterances into subtitles displayed on the screen.

Shortest possible delay. Subtitling for the hard of hearing and deaf provides a text display of the characters' speech interspersed with written descriptions of sound features from the diegetic action that would not be otherwise accessible to Deaf viewers. This transfer of information from speech to written subtitles involves the deployment of dedicated mediation conventions in relation to the colour, spotting and position of subtitles.

Audio descriptions for the blind. Audio description for the blind is a spoken account of those visual aspects of a film that play a role in conveying its plot. The audio describers are engaged in a delicate balancing exercise to establish what the needs of the spectator may be, and to ensure the audience is not overburdened with excessive information.

Lip-synchronized dubbing. Once hailed as the supreme and most comprehensive form of translation (Cary 1969), lip-synchronized dubbing involves the replacement of the original speech by voice track which

Attempts to follow as closely as possible the timing, phrasing, and lip movement of the original dialogue (Luyken et al. 1991).

When it was first developed, the main priority for the film industry was to perfectly fit the actors' lips, in what was to be known as voice 'doubling' and/or 'ghosting'.

In 1991, the Indonesian government announced that foreign films on television should no longer be broadcast in their original language version with Indonesian summaries or subtitles but were to be dubbed into Indonesian. However, only a few months later, President Soeharto reversed his decision on the grounds that dubbing can create gaps in family communication: it can ruin the self-image of the family members as a result of adopting foreign values that are 'Indonesianized'.

Whenever Indonesians view television, films, or other broadcasts where the original language has been changed into our national language, those Indonesians will think the performances in

Those media constitute their own culture. The result is a loss of cultural identity.

American western

In the 1940s-50s, the western genre was born in the USA with the films of John Wayne (who was both an actor and director) and John Ford. It represents the American ideal of a cowboy. The American man was a self-made man, even if he has no rich background, he is always able to become someone. The ideals of good and bad are represented respectively by the cowboy and the Indians.

Spaghetti Western Sergio Leone

Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns in the 1960s-70s subverted the stylistic and narrative conventions of the genre because Leone managed to leave a personal imprint on his films.

Some of the most recognizable features of Leone's 'visual style' are:

• The alternation between extreme close-ups and wide-angled shots
• The use of stylized acting, often interspersed with slow-motion effects to create a perception of expanding time
• The dominance of music by Ennio

Morricone over spoken dialogues within the overall conglomerate of film semiotics;- different ideals from the American version: it was not optimistic or moralistic, but the only character's interest was represented by money;- it differs from the American one also for more bloody, more cruel, more violent and extreme actions, with no more love stories;- the setting was similar, so a desert like environment, but in the Spaghetti version the villages appeared to be desolate, dusty and ugly.

Film critics and genre purists criticised the artistic excesses of his anti-classical style.

Post-production dubbing

Leone's films were shot in a foreign language and later dubbed into English for the enjoyment of mainstream American audiences.

In his westerns, all dialogue was routinely re-recorded during the post-production stage for a number of reasons:- the limited cinematographic technology available in the 1960s hampered Leone's attempts to imprint his own authorial style onto his

There are reasons why films featuring post-synchronized sound may be potentially perceived as subversive by the American film industry:

• The centrality of voice in Hollywood films is one of the indices of the individuality of the star.
• The American Dream of meritocracy and individualism was articulated through goal-oriented narratives, the development of the close-up, and strong structures of narcissistic identification and moral allegiance.

Leone against Hollywood

Leone's films appear to challenge

Hollywood's adherence to synchronous diegetic sound, described as a contract of thought and expression of a homogeneous thinking subject. During the formative years of sound film, synchronization became a means to construct characters with an ambiguous voice, and hence to articulate a national identity based on individualism and meritocracy. It is against this backdrop that poorly post-synchronized dubbing, as in Leone's Spaghetti Western, may be perceived to undermine the ideological, artistic and economic fabric of the US classical film. Leone's disregard for accurate synchronization can be interpreted as a creative choice, an attempt to resist default conventions. Representational practices in AVT- audiovisual translation, as executed by professionals since the birth of the cinema, is a site of representational practice.- audiovisual translation explores how the complex interweaving of ideological, artistic and economic factors played during the formative years of film.

Making and of audiovisual translation.- audiovisual translation critically examines how dominant audiovisual cultures have attempted to 'construct' selec