From text to screen. A didactic approach to the translation and dubbing of "The handmaid’s tale"

In the last decade, didactic audiovisual translation (DAT) (Talaván, 2020; Lertola, 2019a) has been deeply studied and explored and has been proven to be a great tool to foster the development of different competences in the learning of a language (Sánchez-Requena, 2020; Lertola, 2019b; Talaván & Rodríguez-Arancón, 2018). Apart from this application of the different AVT modes in the foreign language classroom, as the many recent publications within the TRADILEX PID2019-107362GA-I00 project show, translation courses, as well as other content courses can truly benefit from using didactic AVT, bringing, for instance, a great deal of motivation to the learning of a specific subject related to other forms of translation (Ogea, 2020; Botella, 2022: Botella & Ogea, in press). Hence, students work to develop many translation competences, such as the ones described by the different works of PACTE (2000-2022), as well as those multicomponent models of translation competences brought by Kelly (2005), the EMT Board (2017) or Hurtado Albir (2017). This proposal aims at sharing the outcomes of a collaborative project that was conducted with students from two different degrees in which audiovisual translation is somehow included in their curricula. During the learning experience, didactic audiovisual translation was first used in the Literary Translation class (in the framework of the Translation and Interpreting degree), by translating a chapter from Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, and the corresponding excerpt from the namesake HBO series. Subsequently, the second group (from the Film and Culture degree) was prompted to revise the said translation, in order to perform the translation of the audiovisual text and its adaptation for the dubbing of the episode’s scene.

This case study describes the benefits, the competences (regarding synchrony, literary and film language, intertextuality, rhyme and register) and the motivation gained by the students throughout this process, as well as examples of the final proposals.