Abstract
The problem of translation and loss is a cardinal concern in translation studies. Conventional wisdom tells us that translation must necessarily entail loss. However, some translation studies scholars have argued that translation can yield significant originality in the target text. Christiane Nord, for one, argues that literary translators can claim authorial presence by actually causing the source text to “grow” in a way that is quantitative and qualitative. Although Nord’s idea applies mainly to literary translation, it raises questions about how this could apply to translations of other types of creative source texts, such as audio/visual translation. The format of interlingual subtitling between two disparate languages, such as English and Japanese, burdens translation with severe constraints and considerable loss text is taken for granted. But what is lost? Meaning? Nuance? This paper argues that these need not be lost in subtitling. In fact, by applying Nord’s model of source text growth to subtitling, we can see how subtitling produces new value to the source text. Through a close analysis of the Japanese subtitles of the 2007 film, There Will Be Blood, this paper will demonstrate that despite the severe constraints placed on the translation found in film subtitling, subtitles can promote “qualitative growth” by transferring the poetic function of the source text into new configurations in the target text, prompting target text viewers to interpret content in new ways.
Highlights
The problem of translation and loss is a cardinal concern in translation studies
When viewers watch the Japanese subtitled version of the scene, they no longer have the opportunity to process in their own minds the source text meaning and produce their own interpretation
The constraints on subtitling result in the need to condense source text dialogue, but they do not necessarily result in loss of denotative meaning or poeticness. While it is true certain subtitling strategies, such as explicitation, can strip away poeticness in the name of conveying the source text’s denotative meaning, other strategies, such as semi-translation and ellipses, reproduce poeticness from the source text insofar as they prompt target text viewers to make inferences about the ambiguous subtitles in a fashion that is similar to the way source text viewers make inferences about the ambiguous dialogue of the source text
Summary
The problem of translation and loss is a cardinal concern in translation studies. Whenever the topic of translation arises in lay settings, the issue of how much is lost seems quickly to follow. Christiane Nord, for example, calls for reframing literary translation from a view that focuses on what is lost to one that emphasizes what is gained She argues that translation can even promote “growth” of the source text. This quantitative growth refers to the fact that a translation makes a text available to more than just the source culture audience This brings about new ways of viewing the source text, because, as Nord states, “New and different audiences...facilitate new interpretations” (25). The constraints force the subtitler to restructure source text language, and it is this restructuring that establishes a new way for audiences to engage with and make inferences about the source text This is similar to what Nord calls “qualitative growth,” which is when new receivers can “even discover ‘items of the information offer’ which were not available to the source-culture audience” (25). I want to propose that this new way of making inferences about the source text can be considered “qualitative growth” in Nord’s sense
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