The use of dubbing texts for increasing language awareness

Dubbing aims to “create[s] the illusion that people on screen speak the same language as the viewers” (Cintas & Orero 2010), so by definition, it should sound like native speech. However, many researchers argue (see Myers 1973, Baños 2014, Chiaro 2008) that in reality, dubbing creates a form of artificial language, a “prefabricated orality” (Romero Fresco 2009), a “dubbese” which viewers tend to accept through the “suspension of linguistic disbelief [...] that allows the dubbing audience to turn a deaf ear to the possible unnaturalness of the dubbed script while enjoying the cinematic experience.” (Romero Fresco 2009:197).

But what happens when students actively pay attention to the unnaturalness of dubbing? In 2016, I conducted an exploratory, qualitative study where respondents had to identify unnatural items in the text of a video consisting of short clips of television series dubbed into Hungarian from UK and US English. It turned out that respondents identified more unnatural items than I was expecting, including unnatural word order, non-conventional language use, non-register-adequate word choices, etc. Since the first study, this video has become a regular feature in my introductory courses in Audiovisual Translation for students who are not studying translation as their major. I realized that by paying attention to the translated audiovisual language, students tend to realize not just the mistakes in translations, but also the source of these mistakes, i. e. they can identify structural differences between the source (in this case, English) and the target (i. e. Hungarian) language, therefore developing their language awareness in both languages. In my presentation, I will showcase the types of unnatural language use identified by respondents and students throughout the last 5 years, and demonstrate how it is possible to increase students’ language awareness by using dubbing texts in the classroom.