The article addresses the challenges of conveying the genre and linguo-stylistic features of British and American comedy television talk shows when translated into Russian. The relevance of the study ...lies in the fact that identifying translation mistakes in the translations of English-language comedy talk shows allows us to identify the main groups of possible translation challenges. The findings of the study will make it possible to improve the quality of education in the field of linguis- tics, translation studies and mass media space. Translated and adapted foreign entertainment audiovisual content has always been in demand on the domestic media market. One of the most popular types of audiovisual products is a comedy television talk show. This television genre is multifaceted both from the functional and content point of view. A comedy talk show performs informative, affective-evaluative and recreational functions. Besides, it combines a number of multi-genre segments (host’s monologue, interview, game), all aimed to entertain the viewer. The study material comprised the episodes of English-language comedy talk shows translated by amateur translators via voice-over. The study was aimed to identify possible challenges in translating comedy talk shows and to find ways to eliminate them. The content analysis method, the media-linguistic approach and the classification method were applied in the analysis. The study allowed to identify and examine the most frequent translation challenges such as the relationship between verbal and non-verbal components, the problems of conveying the comic effect, the speech characteristics of the show participants and culturally marked vocabulary, the need to comply with the norms of the chosen form of audiovisual translation. Strategies for dealing with the above challenges were also proposed and illustrated with examples. The results of the study may be used in theory and practice of audiovisual translation, as well as in translation studies and journalism.
In this contribution, I will draw on my experience as a translator of the textual component of plurisemiotic objects (i.e., creations that are received by the user through more than one channel: ...visual, aural, iconic, textual) in three different media: cinema, theatre, and comics. After a brief introduction, I will illustrate my point of view with the help of some examples.
Audiovisual translation studies (AVT) have experienced an exponential growth in the last twenty years, have consolidated proven analysis methodologies, and attracted the interest mainly of Western ...scholars. It is interesting to investigate whether these methodologies are also applicable to the study of subtitling of films from linguistically and culturally distant cultures such as Egyptian and Spanish. Therefore, the main objective of this work is to verify whether the translation norms proposed in the translation methods for dubbing and subtitling, traditionally based on language combinations with English, are applicable for the specific case of the Arabic-Spanish language combination, based on the analysis of the treatment of the cultural elements present in the audiovisual texts selected for this research. Among the findings, the distinctive features and colloquial character and spontaneity of the original versions are frequently lost.
Subtitles, as the most common form of audiovisual translation, allow international viewers from all backgrounds to access, comprehend, enjoy, interpret, and remember audiovisual products. However, if ...not performed properly, they may occasionally restrict the viewer's interpretive options, resulting in the loss of many literary or dramatic features of the original films. Focusing on the emotion words/expressions as a distinctive feature of drama, the current study evaluated the quality of the English subtitles of five top Persian drama films. Johnson-Laird Johnson-Laird, Philip Nicholas, and Keith Oatley. 1989. "The Language of Emotions: An Analysis of a Semantic Field." Cognition & Emotion 3 (2): 81-123.
doi:10.1080/02699938908408075
list was used to identify the emotion words/expressions in the corpus. Pedersen's Pedersen, Jan. 2017. "The FAR Model: Assessing Quality in Interlingual Subtitling." Journal of Specialised Translation 28: 210-229 FAR model was employed to evaluate the emotion words/expressions as used in the English subtitles. The results of the study showed that, although the films were subtitled for international film festivals, about four-fifth of subtitles were erroneous of a serious type. The findings reveal that a crucial aspect of maintaining the emotional burden of the genre of drama in translation, particularly subtitling, is conveying equivalently the emotion words/expressions. The findings will be of use not only to researchers and students but also to future audiovisual translators/subtitlers seeking further knowledge in the transfer of emotive language.
The article examines the features of pirated translations of American films into Russian made in the 1980s-90s via single voice-over. The work is relevant due to the lack of diachronic studies ...concerning the domestic practice of audiovisual translation. The tradition of audiovisual translation in the USSR included such common forms of translation as dubbing, voice-over and subtitling. However, apart from official sources of foreign films, the audiences had access to the illegal, "pirated" film distribution. The pirated films were translated by amateur translators via voice-over. By pirated translation in this study we understand the single voice-over which makes both the original soundtrack and the recorded translation audible for the audience. Notably, the translation is voiced not by professional actors but by the translators themselves. In the present study we analysed the pirated translations of 10 American feature films into Russian made in the 1980s-90s. The goal of the study was to evaluate the degree of adequacy of the unlicensed translations. Having applied the methods of contextual and functional-stylistic analysis to the obtained material, we singled out several factors affecting the quality of the pirated translations. The extremely limited time allocated for the translation made its process similar to simultaneous interpreting, causing numerous omissions, pauses, repetitions and mistakes. Nevertheless, the extreme psychological focus allowed the translators to deal successfully with such difficult linguistic phenomena as wordplay and humour. Overall, the pirated translations proved to meet the international audiovisual translation quality requirement - they provided an enjoyable viewing experience for the target audience.
Producing polyglot films has turned into a global cinematic trend lately. The Iranian cinema is no exception, and the number of Iranian polyglot films has also increased recently. Therefore, there is ...a greater need for the systematic analysis of different aspects of multilingualism in audiovisual translation (AVT), particularly in modes like the subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing (SDH) in which the audiences have limited or no access to the original audio content. In this study, first, the concepts of multilingualism in Iranian cinema and Persian SDH were discussed. Then, the representation of multilingualism in three Iranian polyglot films was examined. The results depicted that, in most cases, multilingualism is masked, and the subtitlers were neglectful of the importance of the conveyance of multilingual instances in the plot for the deaf and hard of hearing (DHH). Therefore, it can be claimed that the Persian SDH is yet to reach quality standards. Studies like this have immediate implications for audiovisual translators and film distributors by drawing attention to the importance of SDH, as a relatively understudied area, in promoting media accessibility (MA) for the DHH in the Persian speaking context and beyond.
Despite the fact that subtitling is the most prominent form of audiovisual translation (AVT) in the Arab World, few training centers and academic institutions prepare subtitlers for the industry. The ...present paper sheds light on one of the thorny issues that Arab subtitlers often encounter, namely that of translating metaphorical expressions into English. In particular, it investigates how fourteen students enrolled in the MA program in Audiovisual Translation at Hamad Bin Khalifa University dealt with Arabic metaphors in their subtitling tasks. The students were asked to subtitle two extracts from the famous Syrian series Maraya, and write a commentary on the most problematic issues they encountered during the process. Drawing mainly on Pedersen's (2017) translation strategies for metaphors, the analysis reveals that the students resorted to four strategies: converting metaphor to sense, reproducing the same image in the target language (TL), replacing the image in the source language (SL) with a standard TL image and literal translation. It is also noted that some students faced issues with the Syrian dialect spoken by the original characters of the series, and this resulted in an inaccurate or even in some instances incorrect translation. It is recommended that during their training students should be exposed to more audiovisual materials that contain challenging metaphorical expressions, and should be encouraged to research and read relevant literature on the topic. This will qualify them to become professional subtitlers with a strong academic background, and will certainly improve the quality of their subtitling.
•“It is recommended that during their training students should be exposed to more audiovisual materials that contain challenging metaphorical expressions, and should be encouraged to research and read relevant literature on the topic.”.•“This paper contributes to the literature on Arabic-English subtitling by specifically investigating the strategies adopted by subtitling students when rendering metaphors from Arabic (mother tongue) into English, bearing in mind the technical and cultural constraints of the medium.”.•“Students were also encouraged to read a number of academic papers on metaphors, and the difficulties involved in subtitling them, and the most commonly-adopted strategies in transferring them into other languages.”.•“Finally, audiovisual translation students need to be more frequently exposed to the target culture, especially if it is significantly distant from their own. This exposure would help them select more natural equivalents, which would provide target viewers with a vivid and more accurate account of both the original culture and the characters presented on screen.”.
The danmu interface is a unique feature on Japanese and Chinese video-sharing websites which allows “live” comments to be directly overlaid onto the video. This paper focuses on one particular ...semiotic and social practice materialised on the danmu interface, collaborative user translation, where users use their danmu entries to post translations onto the video frame in their engagement with the “raw meat”, untranslated foreign language videos. Adopting Theo van Leeuwen’s social semiotic approach to visual communication and his conceptualisation of “semiotic regimes”, this study explores how such a translation practice materialises on the danmu interface through an investigation of the use of semiotic resources in relation to relevant semiotic regimes that derive from the semiotic technology of danmu, professional practices of audiovisual translation and relevant regulatory discourses. Multimodal discourse analysis is conducted on a dataset consisting of an untranslated English documentary video posted on Bilibli, the most popular danmu video website in China, and 1973 entries of danmu comments archived on the interface. This paper contributes to the development of social semiotics-oriented multimodal discourse analysis through a focus on the semiotic and social practice of user translation on danmu, adding more depth to existing studies on such a practice, and broadens the scope of non-professional translation studies.
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