Culture-specific References Research Articles

Using annotated pivot templates to transfer culture specific references in audio description: translators’ performance, strategies, and attitudes

ABSTRACT This article investigates the use of pivot templates in audio description (AD), focusing on AD template translators' performance, strategies, and attitudes. Data was collected in a study where six participants, five audiovisual translators, and one describer, were asked to translate audio descriptions for five Spanish clips from a pivot English template into Polish. Following common subtitling practice, the templates were time-coded, and culture specific references (CSR) were not localized but explained in annotations. Three data types were collected: screen recordings, scripts translated into Polish, and post-task interviews. Quantitative analysis of the scripts revealed that the translated scripts retained most CSRs and, on average, transferred 94% of the CSRs from the pivot template and that translators rendered them via tactics known from subtitling. Thematic analysis of the interviews revealed that when deciding about a given tactic, translators took their own and the audience's frame of reference into account. They also considered how helpful the tactic might be in visualizing culture specific references. While the participants found CSRs to be the most challenging part of the task, they considered the task feasible mainly because of the identification and annotations, which they thought to be the main advantage of pivot templates.

Authorial (audio) description

Abstract The unprecedented growth of audiovisual translation practices in the creative industries has boosted the role of creativity which has taken centre stage and become the emblem of global cultural policies. The study addresses the role of creativity in the digital space of Netflix as a means of cross-cultural mediation and communication, and as a multidimensional tool in audio description (AD), in order to provide the end-users (the blind and visually impaired audiences) of digital audiovisual products with participatory and engaging forms of access to the audiovisual ‘planet’. The aim is to investigate whether and how creativity is used to transmit culture-specific references (CSRs) from a translation perspective within a highly discussed TV series streamed on Netflix. To do so, the rendering of the most significant CSRs in the Korean Netflix series Squid Game (SG) as transferred into the English and Italian ADs will be examined.

Between global and local: translation and localization in Netflix Turkey’s media paratexts

ABSTRACT This study analyses Netflix Turkey’s media paratexts in which Netflix’s foreign productions and Turkish originals are promoted by the creative use of local elements and/or culture-specific references. It aims to identify the role of translation in these paratexts in promoting both Netflix and its shows such as Stranger Things among others in Turkey. It also discusses the functions of these paratexts in relation to their socio-political contexts of production and the wider debates around regulation and censorship in Turkey. The analysis shows that translation and localization in the selected paratexts serve to make the foreign shows relatable, evoke a sentiment of nostalgia and create a sense of belonging. Further, the paratexts on Netflix Turkish originals highlight the untranslatability and culture-specificity of Turkish expressions to appeal to the viewers’ national pride, which is arguably informed by a populist approach due to the increasing possibility of restrictions on content.

REALIA IN SUBTITLING – AN INTERCULTURAL ENCOUNTER

The present study aims at providing an analysis of various translation strategies used by subtitlers in the translation of realia or culture specific references. The corpus consists of excerpts from Series 8 of the American sitcom Friends. Culture specific references are analysed in terms of their degree of transculturality and are classified into: proper names, names of places, objects, food and drinks, references to books, movies, TV shows, etc. The analysis indicates, on the one hand, that the degree of transculturality of culture specific references varies according to the profile of the target audience and, on the other hand, that in audiovisual translation the main purpose of foreignizing and domesticating strategies is to mediate an intercultural encounter.

Neutralising Tendency in Subtitling Chinese Culture-Specific References into English

Culture-specific references (hereafter CSRs) feature prominently in films by Chinese fifth- and sixth-generation directors. Based on the observation of 25 English-subtitled Chinese films made by four directors between 1984 and 2017, this paper identifies that the CSRs in the original Chinese dialogue are neutralised in their English subtitles through various translation strategies. The CSRs examined in this study encompass CSRs of customs in Zhang Yimou’s films, CSRs of local arts in Chen Kaige’s films, slang in Jia Zhangke’s films, and humour in Feng Xiaogang’s films, respectively embodying the quintessence of each director’s filmmaking style. A textual analysis is conducted to demonstrate how and why the neutralising tendency emerges in subtitling these Chinese CSRs. It is revealed that the strategies of explicitation, substitution, transposition, compensation and omission are employed to neutralise the CSRs. From a linguistic perspective, such a neutralising tendency can be attributed to the lack of equivalence in English culture, the polysemy of the Chinese CSRs, the compactness of the Chinese language, and sometimes the mistaken intralingual Chinese subtitles. As a constrained translation activity, the subtitling itself aggravates the neutralisation of the CSRs due to technical constraints and target audience considerations. As these films are representative Chinese films, the neutralisation indicates a product norm on the best practice of subtitling high-profile Chinese films. Meanwhile, it is a linguistic explanation for the cultural discount in translating Chinese audiovisual productions (Díaz-Cintas & Zhang, 2022).

“Reinas unidas jamás serán vencidas”: Drag queens in the Iberian Spanish voice-over of RuPaul’s Drag Race

RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009 – present) is an American reality television programme launched by RuPaul Charles, which has turned drag queens into a mainstream phenomenon. After briefly analysing the controversial figure of the drag queen in the light of Judith Butler’s performative turn, as well as drag lingo following Keith Harvey’s framework for identifying camp talk, this research aims at investigating the European Spanish voice-over of Seasons 8 (2016), 9 (2017) and 10 (2018). This work seeks primarily to analyse the choices that are made in the target text to characterise drag queens in the localised European Spanish version available on Netflix. The translation procedures mentioned in this study are partly adapted from Ranzato’s (2015) classification for culture-specific references. The analysis focuses mainly on the creative rendering of (semi-)homophony, drag terms, references to pop culture and grammatical gender.

Teaching lecture comprehension skills through OpenCourseWare video-recorded lectures: A research-informed classroom application

Lecture comprehension is a complex process that involves the decoding of meanings on various levels (e.g., phonological, lexical, syntactic, pragmatic, cultural), thus creating challenges for L2 learners. Moreover, there may be difficulties caused by unfamiliar prosodic patterns or accents of lecturers, as well as facial expressions and gesturing whose meanings may escape L2 students. To address all of these potential obstacles, lecture comprehension activities should implement materials prepared from authentic classroom lectures to provide L2 learners with realistic input, which may also vary according to instructional context.The aim of this article is to illustrate how video-recorded lectures can be analysed to gain insights into their multifaceted nature and how the findings can be used to inform classroom activities to improve lecture comprehension. The article provides 1) a description of how video clips cut from OpenCourseWare lectures can be prepared for research and practice, 2) an overview of two case studies performed on video clips that highlight the use of multimodal ensembles integrating verbal and non-verbal features (e.g., idioms, humour, stance markers, culture-specific references, prosodic patterns, gesturing), and 3) a detailed lesson plan to exemplify how video clips from OCW lectures can be used to facilitate lecture comprehension.

Sophisticated humor against COVID-19: the Polish case

Abstract The analysis undertaken in the article focuses on a group of memes selected from the database which drew on culture-specific references. Specifically, they embrace the memories of socialist times and call on references to comic films and easily recognized characters in order to bring out the re-discovered absurdity of the current COVID-19 situation. This material seems ideal to revisit Raskin’s early notion of sophistication, which was broadly argued to derive from intertextuality as well complexity of references that function as sources of humor. In all the examples discussed we can observe the intertextual and metatextual elements, multiple levels and shifts in points of view and attitudes as well as the mutual relations of verbal to visual within the meme cycles. In order to identify specific mechanisms of sophisticated humor, we attempt to identify the visual or verbal triggers of overlap of the two worlds in question, and discuss comic mechanisms of sophistication, including attributions of desire, belief and intention (purpose) to characters or the narrator as commentators on events or situations.

번역가에 따른 문화 번역의 차이 : 한국단편소설의 영어 번역을 기반으로

This study aims to show whether different translators prefer different methods when translating culture-specific references. For this purpose, the author chose a bilingual book series in which Korean source texts and English translations appeared on the opposite pages. The texts analyzed in this study were 15 Korean short stories and 15 English translations thereof — seven translations by Translator J, four by Translator K, and four by Translator C. In these parallel texts, cultural references belonging in four domains, namely ‘food,’ ‘place,’ ‘person,’ and ‘measurement,’ were chosen and analyzed according to translator. Findings showed that the three translators often used the generalization/domestication methods to translate Korean cultural references. However, Translator K retained cultural otherness by transliterating words related to food and forms of address, while Translator C used more end-notes to explain cultural references.

Treatment of Realia in the Subtitling of Ekphrastic Texts

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.

Reaching a foreign audience

This paper examines some of the issues involved in the intercultural transfer of films. It focuses on the translation of culture-specific references and questions in particular the validity of the notions of foreignisation and domestication, brought to the fore of Translation Studies by Venuti (1995), as a conceptual framework traditionally used to discuss the strategies applied when translating cultural specifics. Drawing on the findings of a pilot study consisting of three French films dubbed and subtitled into English, this paper suggests a theoretical challenge by proposing a more pragmatic approach to the study of cultural transfer in audiovisual translation (AVT). More particularly, it will examine whether it is possible to observe any form of consistency in the strategies used for the translation of culturally-bound references and what this implies for the dialogic relationship between Self and Other, and the representation of alterity.KEYWORDS: Audiovisual translation, cultural transfer, culture-specific references, foreignisation, domestication

Alcançando um público estrangeiro

Este artigo analisa algumas das questões que envolvem a tradução intercultural de filmes. Centra-se na tradução de referências e questões culturais específicas, particularmente, a validade das noções de estrangeirização e domesticação em Estudos da Tradução, elaboradas por Venuti (1995), como uma abordagem conceitual tradicionalmente usada para discutir as estratégias empregadas no processo de tradução de referências culturais. Com base nos resultados obtidos em um estudo piloto composto de três filmes franceses dublados e legendados para o inglês, este artigo sugere um desafio teórico ao propor uma abordagem mais pragmática para o estudo da transferência cultural em tradução audiovisual (TAV). De modo particular, propõe a analisar se é possível observar qualquer forma de regularidade no emprego de estratégias de tradução de referências culturais, assim como de que maneira isso impacta as relações dialógicas entre o Eu e o Outro e a representação da alteridade.

Cultural Norms in Translating Children's Literature

The reader of a translated text is particularly important when the translation is intended for a young audience. The translation must take into account the cultural knowledge of the intended reader. This research looks at the relationships between the translator, the author, and the intended and accidental readers of the source text. It discusses the issue of the low status of children’s books, and translated children’s literature in the literary polysystem. It focuses on the resulted disagreement among translators on the appropriate translational procedure to be followed when translating works with culture specific references (foreignization vs. domestication). It is an attempt to draw the attention to the cultural norms which govern the translation of children’s literature from English into Arabic. The research also examines ‘adaptation’ as the most common translational procedure used in translating children’s works with culture specific items and references. Examples are taken from two works of children’s literature: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Tom Sawyer. The examples reveal incidents of adaptation by means of deletion, replacement and addition.

Testing the retranslation hypothesis for audiovisual translation: the films of Volker Schlöndorff subtitled into English

ABSTRACTThis article uses the Descriptive Translation Studies framework to examine the English subtitles for two German films directed by Volker Schlöndorff: Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum [The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum], directed in 1975, and Die Blechtrommel [The Tin Drum], from 1979, with a view to testing the earliest formulation of the retranslation hypothesis. Using the concept of translational norms as one of its main heuristic tools, this research examines an audiovisual corpus consisting of five different sets of DVD subtitles from the two films: three from Die Blechtrommel, dating from 1995, 2002 and 2010, and two from Katharina Blum, dated 2003 and 2009, thus spanning the era from the advent of digitisation and the beginning of DVD to the rise of TV and film streaming services. The data is analysed to investigate the orientation, in terms of source culture or target culture, of the translation strategies that have been activated by the subtitlers when encountering culture-specific references, and then to pinpoint any diachronic trends that come to the fore. The analysis concludes that the retranslation hypothesis does not apply in this corpus; possible reasons for this finding are discussed.

Cultural Norms in Translating Children’s Literature

The reader of a translated text is particularly important when the translation is intended for a young audience. The translation must take into account the cultural knowledge of the intended reader. This research looks at the relationships between the translator, the author, and the intended and accidental readers of the source text. It discusses the issue of the low status of children’s books, and translated children’s literature in the literary polysystem. It focuses on the resulted disagreement among translators on the appropriate translational procedure to be followed when translating works with culture specific references (foreignization vs. domestication). It is an attempt to draw the attention to the cultural norms which govern the translation of children’s literature from English into Arabic. The research also examines ‘adaptation’ as the most common translational procedure used in translating children’s works with culture specific items and references. Examples are taken from two works of children’s literature: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Tom Sawyer. The examples reveal incidents of adaptation by means of deletion, replacement and addition.

Gatsby? Which Gatsby? How the Novel Fares in Italian Translation

Abstract While anyone proficient in English can read Fitzgerald's texts as he wrote them, for millions of non-English speakers the only option is to rely on translations. The Great Gatsby alone has been translated into at least forty-two different languages. If we take into account that often more than one translation exists within each individual language community, we have to ask ourselves: are we all reading the same text? The novel under examination will be The Great Gatsby and its fifteen Italian translations to date. This article will first follow the editorial journey of the work in Italy, with focus on the first two translations. It will also discuss paratextual elements—the publishing companies, the series within which the novel appeared, dust jackets, product positioning, and so on—and will then concentrate on the transformation of the actual text. One of the debates within translation studies is how “faithful” the translator can or should remain to the original. This article will analyze the varying degrees of freedom available and the consequent effect on an audience which, for linguistic reasons, does not have access to the original version. Elements under investigation will include vocabulary, syntax, and stylistic devices—with specific attention to the way in which culture-specific references have been handled.

Transposer l'étrangeté: la traduction de poètes francophones des Antilles

Les difficultés spécifiques que pose la traduction de la variation linguistique et, en particulier, celle des textes littéraires écrits dans des variétés topolectales riches en connotations et en références à des réalités culturelles particulières a suscité l'intérêt de nombreux spécialistes, notamment à partir des années quatre-vingt-dix lorsque s'est produit ce qui a été appelé le tournant culturel de la traductologie. Dans cet article, nous allons illustrer à l'aide d'exemples appartenant à l'œuvre poétique de différents auteurs franco-antillais contemporains (Guy Tirolien, Ernest Pépin, Joseph Zobel et Nicole Cage-Florentiny) certains des problèmes traductologiques qui se posent ainsi que les stratégies qui peuvent être mises en place pour traduire en espagnol les signifiés dénotatifs et connotatifs de lexèmes diatopiquement marqués en préservant au maximum leur altérité.

Translating culture specific references on television — the case of dubbing

Translating culture specific references on television — the case of dubbing

Investigating trainee translators’ contrastive pragmalinguistic competence: a corpus-based analysis of interclausal linkage in learner translations

ABSTRACTThis article aims to investigate trainee translators’ contrastive pragmalinguistic competence, starting from the assumption that – although more elusively than knowledge about culture-specific references – it represents an important subcomponent of intercultural competence, which can determine the adequacy of translated texts. The study focuses in particular on the translation of interclausal linkage, as it is a form of cohesion which displays different preferences across languages. A multi-parallel corpus of English-to-Italian learner translations of the same source text is analysed to detect regularities and variation in the language behaviour of trainee translators. The frequency of connectives in target texts is compared to both the respective source texts and comparable non-translated Italian texts, in order to determine whether translations are mainly shaped by interference or normalisation. The results of the quantitative analysis confirm previous findings that interference is predominant, with students closely reproducing source text conjunctive patterns at the risk of making translations sound unnatural; more refined qualitative observations, however, reveal that there are also attempts at normalisation. A discussion of the relevance to translator training of the insights obtained is provided, together with suggestions for inclusion in training programmes.

Domestication and Foreignization in Translating Culture-Specific References of an English Text into Arabic

Domestication and Foreignization in Translating Culture-Specific References of an English Text into Arabic