La presencia de lenguaje especializado y préstamos en el documental sobre moda "In Vogue. The editor’s eye"

Audiovisual translation is currently enjoying a “golden age” thanks to several factors such as the great impact of VOD platforms on the audiovisual industry. Not only they have caused an increase in the consumption of audiovisual productions, but also have shaken up the audiovisual industry with an innovative and wide range of programmes involving many different audiovisual genres and topics. Translations of these audiovisual contents are offered to the user, either dubbed or subtitled into Spanish.

This study focuses on fashion translation in the framework of audiovisual translation. By analysing the particular case of the translation and subtitling into Spanish of the documentary entitled "In Vogue: The Editor’s Eye", produced by the US cable channel HBO and available in its original version with Spanish subtitles in HBO Spain from September 2016. By means of a comparative analysis of the original version –in English– and the Spanish version, translatological problems which are specific to fashion translation will be proven, as we consider fashion translation to be a type of specialised translation. This is due to the large number of specialised vocabulary used to designate unambiguously and effectively different concepts regarding clothes, designs, trends, production processes, etc. Furthermore, the audiovisual text on fashion presents a great amount of loanwords from English and French –each one of them being used with precise and different functions. Whereas Gallicisms are transferred to the target text in order to give the idea of classic fashion, tradition and elegance, Anglicisms are related to the most innovative, trend setting and international fashion. This fact may be explained because English language has been established as the “lingua franca” of the fashion industry. Moreover, the translator must be able to decide whether transferring loanwords found from the source language –English in this case– to the target text in order to meet cultural conventions. Thus, the users of these type of documentaries are likely to be familiar with the exclusive fashion language and the presenceof loanwords, so they may expect to encounter them in the translated version, so that the users can perceive modernity, internationality and expressivity. Therefore, the translator needs to consider the characteristics of the potential users of the Spanish version of this documentary, aiming that the translation meets the audience expectations. Besides, the translator has to face the inherent characteristics of audiovisual translation, that is to say the presence of oral speech and its particular characteristics, as well as spatial and temporal limitations linked to subtitling, which may become more complicated in the case of documentaries due to the large amount of specialised terms contained in the audiovisual text.