Spanish Audience Research Articles

The representation of African American identity on screen for a Spanish audience

Existing studies of translations of audio-visual productions that explore African American issues focus exclusively on African American Vernacular English and culturally specific references, the standardisation or omission of which are seen to compromise the originals’ critique of race and their value for in-group identity. This article takes a multimodal approach to three such productions dubbed for a Spanish audience. Firstly, it examines how characters’ African American identity is rendered not only by language but also visually and aurally. Comprehension in dubbed versions is more likely to be affected by non-linguistic matters, such as casting of voice talent. Secondly, it is shown how translations shape the audio-visual creation of a fictional world and extra-diegetic elements that address a particular audience and thus enable in-group identification along ethnic lines. Lastly, an alternative translation strategy is outlined that targets audiences from the international Black diaspora to whom such productions might appeal.

The Reception of North American Art in Spain: The Case of the Fundación Juan March (1975–1990)

Established in the mid-1950s, the Fundación Juan March provided an important space for exhibiting the art of the European avant-garde and, from 1977 onwards, modern art from North America. It is argued that the foundation played an important role in presenting American art exhibitions to Spanish audiences in the post-Franco years and at the end of the Cold War. The shows were organized in partnership with high-profile US institutions, dealers, the artists’ estates and/or the artists themselves. In addition to thematic shows, the foundation hosted solo exhibitions in the 1970s and 1980s, dedicated to de Kooning, Motherwell, Lichtenstein, Cornell, Rauschenberg, Rothko, Hopper, and Warhol.

Translating Multilingualism in Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding

Linguistic diversity is present in many audiovisual productions and has given rise to fruitful research on translation of multilingualism and language variation. Monsoon Wedding (Mira Nair, 2001) is a prototypical film for translation analysis, since multilingualism is a recurrent feature, as the film dialogue combines English (L1) with Hindi and Punjabi (L3), which creates an effect of code-switching. This article analyses how the multilingualism and the cultural elements present in the source text (ST) have been transferred to the Spanish translated text (TT) La boda del monzón. The results show that in the Spanish dubbed and subtitled versions, few Indian cultural elements are left, and little language variation is preserved. Thus, L3 does not play a central role as it does in the source text. In the translation, only a few loan words from Hindi or Punjabi are kept, mainly from the domains of food and cooking, as well as terms of address and greetings, or words related to the wedding ceremony. The results also show that when L3 is not fully rendered in translation, otherness is still conveyed through image and music, thus (re)creating a different atmosphere for Spanish audiences.

Lorca's El sueño de la vida: Metatheatrical Subversion, Social Concern, and the Audience's Experience

Lorca's El sueño de la vida:Metatheatrical Subversion, Social Concern, and the Audience's Experience Andrew A. Anderson The single extant Act I of El sueño de la vida (1935–1936) combines socio-political concerns, expressed more explicitly here than Lorca had ever done before, with experiments in metatheatre that are in some senses more extreme than those found in any of his previous plays. Metatheatrical features include a broken fourth wall, "plants" in the audience, actors who lapse in and out of character or change character, powerful sound effects emanating from outside the auditorium, and reported events occurring off stage that finally engulf the theatre at the end of the act. At the same time, the work's themes involve social inequality and injustice, radical politics (left and right), religion, and the pressing need for major economic and cultural change. These two distinct threads intertwine in the idea of revolution and in the relation of the theatre with, and impact on, real life that is envisaged and advocated by the text. While previous criticism has rightly stressed the play's many unusual features, it has not fully recognized the many odd occurrences, uncertainties, and internal inconsistencies that permeate the script and hence serve to subvert any univocal interpretations.1 In turn, this underlying and pervasive ambiguity creates an unsettling effect that is ultimately disruptive of the status quo. The action takes place inside a theatre, extending to both the stage and the auditorium, meaning that, in any given production, the performance space as well as the area where the audience is seated function simultaneously as the overall setting where the scenes of the play unfold. This fact alone blurs, indeed almost obliterates, the distinction between the real and the fictional, creating an effect highly reminiscent of Tamayo y Baus's Un drama nuevo. There, similarly, in the second part of Act III, [End Page 129] the nineteenth-century Madrid theatre serves imaginatively as the space where the Elizabethan-era tragedy is performed, and the Spanish audience passively plays the part of the groundlings watching it, creating a confusion that is only partly clarified by the character of Shakespeare in his closing speech. In the case of El sueño de la vida, the basic circumstances surrounding the action are even less clear. There are two plausible possibilities, though neither serves to integrate and explain all the details that we eventually encounter. The first scenario that can be imagined is that the audience has gone to see a performance of a more or less conventional play, one whose title is never revealed.2 However, the Autor hijacks that day's performance and, improvising, turns it into something completely different. Consequently, the audience's expectations are unfulfilled, as is conveyed in some of the comments made early on by the married couple Espectador 1.º and Espectadora 1.ª (Lorca 139–43). The second is that this would be the opening night of a new play about which very little is known in advance. Again, the audience members attend the premiere with their usual expectations of being entertained but are confounded when they encounter an entirely disconcerting presentation that breaks almost all the prevailing theatrical norms, and which has been carefully planned out in advance by the Autor. No curtain rises at the beginning of the play. Rather the Autor comes out on stage with a "Telón gris" (137) behind him. One might reasonably assume that this was the front or house curtain —"No voy a levantar el telón"— (137), but subsequent stage directions cast doubt on this. At different points three painted curtains are lowered; all of them appear to be backdrops, and the third is specifically identified as such (139; 149; "telón de fondo," 153; cf. also the reference to "telones pintados," 149). Either the draft manuscript is lacking the indication for the grey curtain to be raised (though it is unclear what would be the appropriate moment for this to happen), or else it needs to be imagined as situated considerably further back in the stage space, to allow for these three curtains to cover it and each other in turn. The Autor...

Original Contents, Celebrities and Proximity. How Netflix Spain used Instagram to Bring its Catalogue to Young People during the Pandemics

This study focuses on how Netflix Spain harnessed Instagram to acquaint young people with its catalogue during the Covid-19 pandemic, with the sudden increase in OTT consumption. This led Netflix Spain to adapt its social media strategies and production release dates to a situation without parallel and in the face of intense competition. We analyze the messages during the state of alarm in Spain (from 15 March to 21 June of 2020), when Netflix was the most consumed OTT service. Netflix promoted recently released productions and used proximity strategies, both to GenZ and to Spanish audience, such as toning down with humor the daily problems of lockdown, using juvenile slang (“crush”, “shipping”), referring to the habits of young people (taking selfies, sending audio messages) and using the social media of the cast of their most popular series, promoting them as “Netflix celebrities” and emphasizing their good-looks and sexual attractive.

Emotional Responses of Finnish and Spanish Audiences to Culturally Loaded Films

The success of a film depends not only on the quality of individual elements in the film but also on cultural factors that may influence the viewers’ reactions. In this study, we investigated the role of these factors by presenting Spanish and Finnish participants films produced in Finland, Spain, or the United States. Emotional reactions were assessed online through a response system synchronized with the films and offline through questionnaires. Results indicated that overall emotional reactions of the two audiences were very similar, suggesting a high degree of universality. However, we also found differences in the way the two audiences reacted to some specific sequences within the films. Qualitative analyses suggested that these differences are related to some cultural dimensions (e.g., collectivism). We interpret the data as supporting both universality and cultural mediation where cultural variation might be more evident in films varying in narrative structure, genre, or cultural origin.

Consumption of Specialized Travel Magazines in Spain

This study analyzes the interests of Spanish audiences in travel magazines within the current context of press consumption. The objectives are to identify the readers' reading frequency and reasons for reading, what contents interest them, and what aspects of the photographs attract them. The methodology involves a structured questionnaire completed by a representative sample of the Spanish population (n=1000). The main results reveal a low reading frequency, great interest in practical information, preference for landscape photography (over the age of 54) and nightlife photography (young people), and indifference regarding the journalistic source of the images. These data provide relevant information on which to adapt travel magazines' content strategy.

로페 데 베가의 성체극과 기사 문학

Lope de Vega's The Bridge of the World, which added public interest of a chivalric literature to the religious solemnity of the sacramental act made a fresh impression on the Spanish audience who were enthusiastic about the chivalric novels. Since the essence of Christianity is the spiritual warfare between Christ and Satan, the sacramental act and the secular chivalric literature are naturally connected. By summoning the Spanish public's passion for chivalric literature and incorporating it into his sacramental act, a representative genre of the Counter-Reformation, Lope de Vega satisfied not only the Catholic Church's purpose of catechesis but also the adventurous taste of the Spanish audience. The incorporation of chivalric literature, a typical secular literature, into a Catholic religious drama, ideally embodied the aesthetics of Horatius' dulce et utile.

The Presence of American Drama in the Spanish Non-Professional Theatre of the 1950s

American dramatists arrived in the Spanish theaters rather late, in the 1950s. In the beginning they were generally represented by non-professional theater groups (exemplified here by Dido Pequeño Teatro) that aimed to challenge the obsolete plays produced on the mainstream stages during Franco’s dictatorship (1939-1975). Thanks to these companies that were an alternative to the commercial theaters, Spanish audiences gradually discovered many contemporary playwrights whose plays were being staged in the rest of Europe at the time. This article focuses on three American authors who were the first significant ones to be staged in Spain: Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams and the American-born T.S. Eliot, and were chosen by Dido Pequeño Teatro. This paper briefly presents the three authors and their theater, together with their success in the United States, in order to then concentrate on their first appearance in Spain. We highlight four plays that were produced by one of the most significant Spanish non-professional groups of that era, Dido Pequeño Teatro. The article then takes a closer look at how the plays were received by the critics and the general audience and analyze their success.

Metaphorical dimension of idioms in TV series for German, Norwegian and Spanish audiences

Over recent years, internet TV series have grown in popularity to become one of the audiovisual products with the highest audiences worldwide. The Covid crisis, with limitations on movement, has further increased their success during 2020-21. English is by far the most common language for such productions, which are typically offered to non-anglophone viewers in translated format, with either subtitles or dubbing. One of the main challenges in translation here concerns the use of idioms, since these do not always have a fixed equivalent in the target language. Taking as a starting point a corpus of drama series from Netflix and Amazon Prime, this study considers the metaphorical dimension of idioms in original TV series in English and the subtitling of these in German, Norwegian and Spanish. The aim is to analyze the strategies used in the translation process, and to look at the differences between the original dialogues and the translated subtitles. The data are described from a cognitive and contrastive perspective, according to the methodology developed by the author. The results of the analysis show a general trend towards the reduction of metaphorical expressions in the translated subtitles. Significant differences are found between the translations into the three target languages under examination. A surprising finding is that there are more similarities between the German and Spanish translations than between those into German and Norwegian, despite these latter two belonging to the same Germanic linguistic family.

Use of a Paid Digital Marketing Campaign to Promote a Mobile Health App to Encourage Parent-Engaged Developmental Monitoring: Implementation Study.

BackgroundThe internet has become an increasingly popular medium for parents to obtain health information. More studies investigating the impact of paid digital marketing campaigns for parents on promoting children’s healthy development are needed.ObjectiveThis study aims to explore the outcomes of a paid digital marketing campaign, which occurred from 2018 to 2020, to promote messages about parent-engaged developmental monitoring and ultimately direct parents to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) Milestone Tracker app, a mobile health (mHealth) app developed by the CDC.MethodsThe paid digital marketing campaign occurred in 3 phases from 2018 to 2020. In each phase, 24 to 36 marketing messages, in English and Spanish, were created and disseminated using Google’s Universal App Campaigns and Facebook Ads Manager. Outcomes were measured using impressions, clicks, and install data. Return on investment was measured using click-through rate (CTR), cost per click, and cost per install metrics.ResultsThe Google-driven marketing messages garnered a total of 4,879,722 impressions (n=1,991,250, 40.81% for English and n=2,888,472, 59.19% for Spanish). The messages resulted in a total of 73,956 clicks (n=44,328, 59.94% for English and n=29,628, 40.06% for Spanish), with a total average CTR of 1.52% (2.22% for English and 1.03% for Spanish). From these clicks, there were 13,707 installs (n=9765, 71.24% for English and n=3942, 28.76% for Spanish) of the CDC’s Milestone Tracker app on Google Play Store. The total average cost per install was US $0.93 across all phases. The phase 3 headline “Track your child’s development” generated the highest CTR of 3.23% for both English and Spanish audiences. The Facebook-driven marketing messages garnered 2,434,320 impressions (n=1,612,934, 66.26% for English and n=821,386, 33.74% for Spanish). The messages resulted in 44,698 clicks (n=33,353, 74.62% for English and n=11,345, 25.38% for Spanish), with an average CTR of 1.84% (2.07% for English and 1.38% for Spanish). In all 3 phases, animated graphics generated the greatest number of clicks among both English and Spanish audiences on Facebook when compared with other types of images.ConclusionsThese paid digital marketing campaigns can increase targeted message exposure about parent-engaged developmental monitoring and direct a parent audience to an mHealth app. Digital marketing platforms provide helpful metrics that can be used to assess the reach, engagement, and cost-effectiveness of this effort. The results from this study suggest that paid digital marketing can be an effective strategy and can inform future digital marketing activities to promote mHealth apps targeting parents of young children.

The Mystical Political: Reclaiming the Spectacle of the Vision in Vicente Aranda’s Libertarias (1996) and Azucena Rodríguez’s Entre rojas (1995)

This article examines the spectacle of the mystical vision in two Spanish films from the mid-1990s, Vicente Aranda’s Libertarias (1996) and Azucena Rodríguez’s Entre rojas (1995). I explore how the films invoke the visual and vocal codes of the mystical vision at key moments in the narrative to positively structure communities of women. Drawing on classic feminist film theory, Michel de Certeau’s interdisciplinary analysis of early modern mysticism, and Jean Luc Nancy’s concept of the inoperable community, this study demonstrates how the mystic’s performance of extrasensory communication, so familiar to Spanish audiences through centuries of religious practice and cultural production, can challenge conventional visual and auditory regimes and model new ways for diverse groups to coexist.

Moving forward to improve SDH: the needs of Spanish audiences

ABSTRACT Although Subtitling for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (SDH) is well established as a modality of audiovisual translation, many questions remain to be answered about viewers’ real needs. Despite the improvements in UNE standard 153010:2012, Spanish digital television broadcasters still do not offer equal SDH services. This limits the audience’s access to the multimedia content on their channels. This study aims to discover the needs and wishes of Spanish viewers regarding the subtitling services currently offered by Spanish digital television, to highlight the subtitle features that should be modified to enhance the accessibility of subtitling services. To collect this data, a survey was created and distributed among both the d/Deaf and hearing audiences of Spanish digital television. A total of 104 volunteers took part in the study: 42 d/Deaf and Hard of Hearing and 62 hearers. The results show that the two groups have similar opinions about the Spanish SDH service, which might benefit all users. Indeed, the new goal is to offer the best solutions for subtitling services to the widest audience possible. The study also confirms many of the findings of the Long questionnaire in Spain by Arnáiz-Uzquiza, and in the UK by Romero-Fresco.

Mary Tudor – From the Page to the Screen

This article explores representations of Mary I of England, wife of Philip II of Spain. Specifically, it examines the portrayal of the queen – perhaps most famously known by the epithet ‘Bloody Mary’ – in the TV series Carlos, Rey Emperador (2015-2016), and in its associated online supporting materials. It details how textual representations of Mary underpin European visual depictions of the queen, and considers the ways in which Mary transcends stereotypical, quintessentially English-language portrayals of Mary for Spanish and Portuguese audiences. In doing so, it posits wider observations on the mnemonic strategies underpinning the series Carlos, Rey Emperador, and its different framings for Spanish and Portuguese audiences on the Internet.

Queer and insufficiently Spanish: tensions of gender and national identity around the transnational stardom of Luis Mariano

ABSTRACT During the 1950s, Luis Mariano was the main star of French film musicals. Born in Spain, but exiled to France after the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, the artist starred in several successful French-Spanish co-productions such as Andalousie/El sueño de Andalucía (1951), Violettes impériales/Violetas imperiales (1952) or Le chanteur de Mexico/El cantor de México (1956). This article analyses Luis Mariano’s stardom from a transnational perspective. Although some French scholars have started to study it within the framework of French cinema, Luis Mariano’s stardom worked in very different ways in Spain, as it implied and generated multiple tensions related to gender, queerness and national identity. Moreover, these tensions caused the introduction of changes in the films to adapt them to the Spanish audiences. Through the analysis of films, reviews, press articles, censorship documents and biographies, among other media texts, this article compares the results of the research on Luis Mariano in France with the investigation of his stardom in Spain, in order to evidence different relationships of the audiences of each country with the star and how he was read and received in diverse ways in each national context.

El impacto de las plataformas de podcast en redes sociales: Estudio de caso en las cuentas oficiales de iVoox y Anchor en Instagram, Facebook y Twitter

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to analyze the presence and impact of the platforms specialized in the storage and diffusion of podcasts, Anchor and iVoox, on the major social networks, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Design / Methodology / Approach: This study is based on a quantitative methodology supported by the Fanpage Karma tool, which allows a correct monitoring and compilation of the different aspects that shape a profile on social networks and which, additionally, is applicable to the indicated platforms. The study period was from January 1, 2020 to November 15, 2020. Results: The results obtained confirm the relevance of social networks for the diffusion of podcast content, while we discovered that the social network most used by both companies is Twitter, a fact that highlights this research, since Instagram has been one of the fastest growing social networks in recent years. Limitatios / Implications: Given that the companies defined in the object of study have specific replicas in several countries, it would be interesting to make a comparative study between the impact and presence in Spain and in other countries. Originality / Contribution: Nearly 10 million users in Spain listen to podcasts, a figure that reveals the importance of this format to the Spanish audience. If we consider the nature of this type of content, i.e., consumed over the Internet, its diffusion through social networks is essential to obtain greater penetration, since in Spain, there are 26 million people who use social networks according to the latest Iab.Spain report. Consequently, studying the relationship and impact of the main podcast platforms on social networks is a topic of interest for the scientific community, while at the same time presenting an x-ray of the current panorama on this issue.

Evolución de los intereses y hábitos de consumo televisivo de la audiencia española

Atendiendo a los datos de consumo, los intereses televisivos de la audiencia española, en lo que a contenidos se refiere, no parecen haber cambiado de forma drástica en los más de setenta años de historia de televisión en España. La televisión – la generalista en abierto y ahora las plataformas OTT – se ve condicionada por los hábitos de consumo de su audiencia pero, al mismo tiempo, es capaz de marcar la propia identidad de los espectadores con los contenidos que produce y ofrece. La programación televisiva ha sabido adaptarse a cada contexto histórico-social, especialmente cuando se produjo la irrupción de las cadenas privadas, con la apuesta por nuevos formatos y géneros televisivos. Para comprobar este escenario, y validar precisamente estos modelos de consumo, se ha realizado una investigación ad hoc estructurada en siete focus groups coincidentes con las franjas de edad del Estudio General de Medios. Los resultados muestran, según las distintas edades, cómo se consume hoy el contenido televisivo, cuáles son las conductas del espectador viendo la televisión y cuáles son los formatos y géneros más demandados.

Stories and Politics of Hispanism

Stories and Politics of Hispanism Alberto Medina KEYWORDS Hispanism, Hispanic Institute, Institito de las Españas, Federico de Onís In 1915, just one year before Federico de Onís arrived in New York after accepting an appointment as professor at Columbia University with the mission to build a program for the teaching of Spanish language and culture—and five years before he founded the Instituto de las Españas—he was writing some of the first film criticism in Spain. He had accepted an offer by his friend Ortega y Gasset to publish periodically about the new medium in España, his new weekly magazine. It was a short commitment, soon interrupted by his move overseas. Onís was not so much interested in the present of film as in its future, what it could become. Even if the new medium was still only an initial gesture, an insinuation of something to come, its mass appeal was already evident. Its extraordinary capacity to bring together, in the same room, before the same film, people from every race, class, or cultural origin, speaking many different languages, made clear that it could only be considered a "new instrument for humanity" of extraordinary potential (Onís et al. 68). Once in the US, Onís would have the opportunity to experience first-hand the cultural and social processes that he had witnessed in film and to put them to good use. The decades-long promotion of Spanish culture in the US and Latin America that he started in 1916 required a deep knowledge of the same processes of modernity that he had admired so much in the movie industry. Years later, after he had settled in New York, Juan Ramón Jiménez referred to him as a "Charlot Latino" (Ruiz-Manjón 15). Like the most famous actor in the world, Onís had the extraordinary capacity to be always identical to himself and yet always a successful character. The same perception was common among the many cultural visitors from Spain and Latin America whom Onís hosted through his Instituto de las Españas, which would later become the Hispanic Institute. For Moreno Villa or Concha Espina, among others, he was a constant performance of himself, systematically stressing his Spanishness both in his voice and his dress. He was not only the main cultural ambassador of Spain in the US, he was also "el más insigne modelo de nuestra raza" (Espina 142). It was, of course, a very deliberate strategy that the film critic had the chance to learn from the screen. It was also a necessary way to make tradition modern, marketable, and popular. When he had to defend the relevance of his work in the [End Page 1] US before a Spanish audience and perhaps particularly against the strong criticism from his beloved mentor Unamuno, he chose a very Spanish icon: he was a Don Quixote in America. Far from weakening his national identity and dissolving it in the American melting pot, the contact with the US had allowed him to go deeper into an "españolismo radical" that opened every door to him (Onís, "El español" 266). His adventures in the New World allowed him to get closer to that "modelo de nuestra raza" that Concha Espina would see in him. That model was not so much a return as a projection: "Ya antes de salir de España sentía la atracción de la América española como razón última del ser histórico de España" (España en América 9). For Onís, the success of both his character and his cultural mission was not about any kind of mutual assimilation but rather a radical affirmation of difference, a fight for visibility that could only be achieved through a successful performance. And so the timeless Don Quixote knew how to display the abilities of the modern Charlot. Onís was very conscious of the danger at the core of the success of the Spanish language in the US: if it was possible thanks to a popular demand driven by commercial ties with Latin America, the enemies of...

Translating an Oriental Frame Tale and its Translator in Hapsburg Spain: The Prefaces to theEspejo político y moral(1654, 1659)

In comparison with earlier, medieval translations of Kalila wa-Dimna, such as the well-known Calila e Dimna (1251) or the Exemplario contra los enganos y peligros del mundo (1483), the version composed by Vicente Bratutti from a sixteenth-century Turkish source, the Espejo politico y moral para principes y ministros y de todo genero de personas (1654, 1659), has been the focus of much less scholarship. Yet, as I will argue, it is worthy of critical attention, above all for the ideological richness of the prefaces written by the translator and censors, which provide differing and often contrasting perspectives on both this famous Eastern work and Spain’s position in the world and relations with other powers. This article examines how the fables were framed by Bratutti and the censors for new audiences, and how their relevance for the Spanish monarchy was justified. It considers the representation of translatio studii et imperii; and it looks at how its Ragusan translator was himself ‘translated’ by the Inquisition’s censors for seventeenth-century Spanish audiences.

Profanity and blasphemy in the subtitling of English into European Spanish: four case studies based on a selection of Tarantino’s films

The combination of profanity and blasphemy can be said to be one of the most delicate taboo categories to deal with on the screen. It is in the context of audiovisual translation (AVT) where professionals have to make challenging decisions when transferring these elements. Thus, should audiovisual translators be faithful to the source text or is it legitimate that they tone down the load of profanity and blasphemy? This paper describes the subtitling into European Spanish of a corpus composed of some of Tarantino’s films on the grounds of profane and blasphemous phrases which could provoke a strong reaction from the audience. Among the main goals of this paper are: scrutinising (1) if the religious phrases under analysis are transferred faithfully; and (2) whether or not cases of blasphemy in the target text have been encountered. In a nutshell, this study aims to explore the treatment of profanity and blasphemy in the subtitles produced for the Spanish audience.