The treatment of multilingualism in Catalan-Spanish audiovisual translation. A case study of "The hockey girls"

Audiovisual content that does not have English as the main production language is experiencing a boom on video-on-demand platforms. At the same time, audiovisual creators have been challenged by film and television academies to create content that reflects the cultural diversity and the multilingualism of current societies (Santamaria, 2019). The series "The hockey girls" (Brutal Media, 2019), originally recorded in Catalan and also available in Castilian Spanish on Netflix, follows this trend and incorporates characters who speak different Romance languages, such as Portuguese or Spanish in both Castilian and Argentinian variety, as well as other foreign languages. Our article proposes a case study of the series from an interdisciplinary approach between Sociolinguistics and Audiovisual Translation Studies. On the one hand, the selected product is interesting because it represents the natural attitudes towards social multilingualism or linguistic cosmopolitanism of young people in Catalonia (Newman et al., 2008; Trenchs-Parera et al., 2014) and reflects typical phenomena of multilingual societies, such as code-switching or linguistic convergence. On the other hand, despite the fact that the study of multilingualism and its translation in audiovisual products has been explored in depth in the last decade (Corrius et al., 2019), the studies that address the Catalan-Spanish language combination are still scarce. This paper fills this gap by documenting the treatment of multilingualism in the series in the following TAV modalities: subtitling for the d/Deaf and hard of hearing in Catalan, conventional subtitling and subtitling for the d/Deaf and hard of hearing in Spanish, dubbing in Spanish, and audio subtitling in Catalan and Spanish.