Abstract
As far as the basic tenets and technical constraints of subtitling go, the subtitling of documentaries devoted to various types of visual arts does not differ significantly from subtitling performed with other types of audiovisual content. However, each source material has aspects that go beyond the technical framework, encompassing cultural idiosyncrasies and culture-specific references. A special place among such items belongs to realia, in the sense of words and phrases denoting concepts characteristic of one nation and foreign to another. This article narrows down the scope of its research of such phenomena to a corpus consisting of several art documentaries ranging in subject from Byzantine to Ottoman and Chinese art and translated from English into Croatian, examining the strategies used to deal with realia in ekphrastic texts and the overall treatment of the concepts which they denote, while at the same time providing insight into the role played by the visual experience given by subtitles as an integral part of the representational process. The paper is partially based on a talk given in February 2016 at the Audiovisual Representation conference in Rome but as the research project had been a work-in-progress, it has since been substantially revised and expanded.
Highlights
Taking as our starting point Lawrence Venuti’s (2010, p. 132) assertion that translation theory provides methodology for studying ekphrastic texts and their relation to their source images, enabling the comprehension of both the social and cultural connotations of the source material, as well as those of secondary interpretation, the main aim of this study is to explore the strategies used by translators in dealing with culturally-specific items such as realia in the adaptation and interpretation of ekphrastic source material in subtitles
The study shall focus on the professional Croatian subtitling market and examine a corpus of twelve art documentaries, using a methodological framework partially derived from the work of Jan Pedersen (2011) and Hannah Silvester (2018), as well as the contemporary notions of literary and digital ekphrasis (Brosch, 2018; Lindhé, 2013)
Taking into account that the Croatian audiovisual market is not overly large and that the corpus includes translations created by the three largest AVT providers (HRT who have their own in-house translation service, Mediatranslations who are contractors for RTL Media, and SDI Media who translate for Viasat), the uniformity of the findings still merits further discussion and can serve as a basis for drawing several conclusions regarding the overall aims of the study
Summary
Taking as our starting point Lawrence Venuti’s (2010, p. 132) assertion that translation theory provides methodology for studying ekphrastic texts and their relation to their source images, enabling the comprehension of both the social and cultural connotations of the source material, as well as those of secondary interpretation, the main aim of this study is to explore the strategies used by translators in dealing with culturally-specific items such as realia in the adaptation and interpretation of ekphrastic source material in subtitles. Documentary translators need to take into consideration the register of the source text (formal narration, informal interviews), textual function (purely informative, entertaining or a combination of both) and specific guidelines set by the client (translation agency, broadcasting company, independent film festival etc.) as well as eventual habits and unwritten rules present in a specific language market. All of this makes documentary translation a specific audiovisual practice The following sections will briefly define and discuss the concepts central to this study, namely ekphrasis and realia, and provide an analysis of the manner in which realia were treated in the examined corpus of art documentaries and their role in the overall ekphrastic experience
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