Title
All this song and dance about culture. A contrastive analysis of the translation of cultural references in the Spanish subtitling and dubbing of Indian cinema
Conference name
Media for All 8
City
Country
Sweden
Modalities
Date
19/06/2019
Abstract
The aim of this presentation is to make a contribution to research on the translation of Other cinemas and analyse existing translations of Indian films in Spain. As noted by Desai and Dudrah (2008), India is a country where multiple regional industries collectively produce, in more than 30 languages, the largest number of films in the world. Yet, research in Translation Studies on this topic has been minimal, with the exception of a few recent studies on multilingualism in Indian diaspora cinema (Higes Andino 2014), or case studies of the works of more internationally recognised directors such as Deepa Mehta or Mira Nair (Di Giovanni 2008).
This paper uses an empirical, interdisciplinary methodology based on Descriptive Translation Studies (Toury 1995) with a bottom-up approach to study a corpus of 13 Indian films which are available commercially with subtitled and dubbed versions in DVD format. It takes issues that have been discussed in Audiovisual Translation Studies, albeit usually from the perspective of European and American cinematic traditions and socio-cultural heritage, and applies them to a varied corpus of Indian cinema.
It carries out a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the Spanish translation of cultural references in Indian cinema, based on existing models developed by researchers such as Gottlieb, Mayoral, Nedergaard Larsen, Diaz-Cintas, Pedersen and Ranzato. Given that a large number of case studies dealing with cultural references have been applied to language pairs that may be considered to be relatively close, in terms of geographical and cultural proximity, it is worthwhile to determine the extent to which they can account for translations of a somewhat more distant source text and culture.
It also seeks to investigate whether the concept and definition of a cultural reference can be extended to certain features of Indian cinema aesthetics that do not readily fit into the existing models and approaches to cultural transfer in translation. One such feature of Indian cinema is its prolific use of musical sequences. This presentation looks at the cultural, narrative and contextual function of such musical sequences, as well as the techniques used to translate them, based on current research in song translation (Franzon 2008, Kaindl 2005, Susam-Sarajeva 2008).
This paper uses an empirical, interdisciplinary methodology based on Descriptive Translation Studies (Toury 1995) with a bottom-up approach to study a corpus of 13 Indian films which are available commercially with subtitled and dubbed versions in DVD format. It takes issues that have been discussed in Audiovisual Translation Studies, albeit usually from the perspective of European and American cinematic traditions and socio-cultural heritage, and applies them to a varied corpus of Indian cinema.
It carries out a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the Spanish translation of cultural references in Indian cinema, based on existing models developed by researchers such as Gottlieb, Mayoral, Nedergaard Larsen, Diaz-Cintas, Pedersen and Ranzato. Given that a large number of case studies dealing with cultural references have been applied to language pairs that may be considered to be relatively close, in terms of geographical and cultural proximity, it is worthwhile to determine the extent to which they can account for translations of a somewhat more distant source text and culture.
It also seeks to investigate whether the concept and definition of a cultural reference can be extended to certain features of Indian cinema aesthetics that do not readily fit into the existing models and approaches to cultural transfer in translation. One such feature of Indian cinema is its prolific use of musical sequences. This presentation looks at the cultural, narrative and contextual function of such musical sequences, as well as the techniques used to translate them, based on current research in song translation (Franzon 2008, Kaindl 2005, Susam-Sarajeva 2008).