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. In the case of voice-over isochrony, the relationship was definitely not causal. The standard practice consisted of the voice artists reading the translation after hearing the original utterance with no guidelines specifying the exact number of seconds they should leave before starting reading the translation. Literal synchrony appeared in very few cases. The relationship of this type of synchrony with translation techniques could also be qualified as random Action and kinetic synchronies, on the other hand, were kept in most of the cases and transfer and condensation were the most common techniques that could be related to them. The analysis also revealed that out of four types of synchronies, voice-over isochrony is the only one which actually helped expose multilingual context in the movie. Given its nature, as it exposed the original soundtrack even if for a short amount of time, this synchrony might enhance the linguistic diversity in the movie. This led to the question whether this diversity was in fact processed by viewers, an inquiry that was empirically addressed in the third study. For comparative and controlling reasons, the third study introduced subtitling to the analysis. The results of the experiment showed that content comprehension depended on the audiovisual translation mode, yielding higher levels of performance in the subtitled condition than in the voice-over one. At the same time, the findings suggested that information processing in voiced-over programs was not as efficient as in the subtitled version. Second, the results indicated that the audiovisual translation mode did not predict the performance on detection of the number of languages spoken by character in multilingual productions. Finally, it was concluded that neither the AVT mode nor the multilingual and monolingual characters were significant predictors of character– language pair identification in a multilingual movie.