Voice-over in multilingual fiction movies in Poland. Translation and synchronization techniques, content comprehension and language identification

This dissertation analyzed voiced-over multilingual movies in Poland. In particular, it focused on different translation and synchronization techniques applied in voiced-over multilingual movies and then shifted its focus to information processing, comprehension and identification of various languages in voiced-over movies. Three main objectives were formulated in this research: 1) To establish how multilingual elements are translated in voiced-over movies into Polish; 2) To establish the relationship between synchronization and translation techniques in multilingual movies voiced-over into Polish and to analyze which combinations of synchronization and translation techniques are most efficient in rendering multilingual context; and 3) To test how multilingual elements are processed by Polish viewers in both voiced-over and subtitled multilingual movies. With those objectives in mind, two descriptive and one experimental studies were carried out. The first study showed that introducing multilingual elements in source texts was a deliberate procedure, which often disappeared in the target text. The analysis of the corpus showed that multilingual elements were significantly reduced in the Polish versions. The analysis revealed that although many translation techniques were detected in utterances with L3 elements, only two techniques-imitation and exhibition-reinforced multilingual content in the translated version. Other techniques, most frequently encountered, just erased linguistic diversity present in the original versions. However, as the original soundtrack in voiced-over movies is still audible to some point, skillful synchronization of the two soundtracks helped in marking multilingual context in the movie. The second study indicated that the relationship between different synchrony types and some translation techniques, mainly condensation, transfer, paraphrase and decimation did exist but each synchrony showed different patterns as to the nature of this relationship.