Title
How to solve AVT of multilingualism in television comedy, no laughing matter
Conference name
9th International conference Media for all
City
Country
Spain
Modalities
Date
27/01/2021-29/01/2021
Abstract
Scripted language variation, including combinations of languages, dialects and sociolects in the dialogues of AV fiction, has grown remarkably since the early 2000’s with films like Inglourious Basterds, and series like Narcos making it the new normal for mass audiences. Directors and producers have occasionally expressed that they have particular motivations for including different language combinations, diegetic (intratextual) translation, instances of code-switching, pidgins, non-native levels of language use, constructed languages, etc. One of the questions raised by AVT researchers has to do with how such motivations and intentions are maintained or changed in translation (as importantly as the textual make-up) and how the overall effect of the show is affected.
Within the framework of the MUFiTAVi project, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, the Trafilm group is continuing research on multilingual “conversations” (Zabalbeascoa & Corrius 2019) from series available on streaming platforms, coupled with their AVT renderings. Part of our interest in multilingualism focuses on the issue of translating humour and humoristic elements, how they interact with discourse, and how all of this in turn is affected by gender, social class, character portrayal and stock characters, as well as plot twists, stereotyped dialogues and dialogue patterns, cultural identities, settings and sceneries according to popular stereotyped perceptions of space, time and action.
In our presentation, we will focus on findings, analysis, and conclusions from samples of language combinations and switching in the particular case of fictitious language-learning scenes and situations from TV series such as Sex Education, Better Call Saul, and Community. We study multilingualism in fiction according to some of the variables already found, like comprehensibility; delving more deeply into the motivation and intended effect of incomprehensibility: lack of speaker proficiency, obscure vocabulary, farcical use of language, pragmatic inadequacy, plot-related elements, etc. We will explore the under- or over-use of potentially interesting translation strategies, such as omission in subtitles (as in Kraemer & Eppler, 2018), or left unchanged in the case of dubbing, compared to how and how often they are actually exploited and what alternative solutions can be heard on online broadcasting.
Within the framework of the MUFiTAVi project, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, the Trafilm group is continuing research on multilingual “conversations” (Zabalbeascoa & Corrius 2019) from series available on streaming platforms, coupled with their AVT renderings. Part of our interest in multilingualism focuses on the issue of translating humour and humoristic elements, how they interact with discourse, and how all of this in turn is affected by gender, social class, character portrayal and stock characters, as well as plot twists, stereotyped dialogues and dialogue patterns, cultural identities, settings and sceneries according to popular stereotyped perceptions of space, time and action.
In our presentation, we will focus on findings, analysis, and conclusions from samples of language combinations and switching in the particular case of fictitious language-learning scenes and situations from TV series such as Sex Education, Better Call Saul, and Community. We study multilingualism in fiction according to some of the variables already found, like comprehensibility; delving more deeply into the motivation and intended effect of incomprehensibility: lack of speaker proficiency, obscure vocabulary, farcical use of language, pragmatic inadequacy, plot-related elements, etc. We will explore the under- or over-use of potentially interesting translation strategies, such as omission in subtitles (as in Kraemer & Eppler, 2018), or left unchanged in the case of dubbing, compared to how and how often they are actually exploited and what alternative solutions can be heard on online broadcasting.