What Film Translation can Tell us About the Creation of Meaning, the Role of Accents and Gestures – A Few Essayistic Remarks About Multimodality

This article aims to illustrate some aspects of film dubbing that are of interest to research in cognition and in particular to cognitive linguistics. Dubbed films contain unavoidable discrepancies between the lip movements and (other) gestures perceived visually and the sounds that are heard. Widening the scope to the issue of different accents of speakers, it is argued that multimodal construction grammar should investigate all modes of meaningful communicative behavior but that this does not necessarily imply the postulation of multimodal constructions as such.

Foreign fi lms editing in USSR as cultural-historical phenomenon

The powers of Soviet fi lm editing extended not only to the sphere of creating domestic fi lms, but also to such areas as the selection and distribution of foreign fi lms. The topic of the article is ideological and aesthetic criteria by which a foreign picture received the right to be shown in the USSR. Editor’s work aff ected all the elements of the cinema process: from the «little things in life» to the fundamental issues of confronting social systems. The rental of a foreign – especially «capitalist» fi lms, sometimes of the most innocent content, nevertheless assumed the presence of a certain ideological message (even if it was not originally intended). One way or another, an idea should have formed in the viewer’s mind: the bourgeois “foreign land” is inevitably inferior to the advantages of living in the country of “triumphant socialism”. The fi lm background of analysis is mainly the work of leading capitalist cinematographies: USA, France, Italy, Germany and Japan. The directions of editorial work related to the adaptation of foreign paintings for the Soviet screen are considered: “political” and “aesthetic” remounting; practice of the names and “renaming” of the fi lm; the reasons why the contents were cut; culture of Soviet film dubbing; the history of «shelf» foreign fi lms in the USSR.

AN ICY FORCE BOTH FOUL AND FAIR: THE THEME OF LOVE VERSUS FEAR IN THE DUTCH DUBBED VERSION OF DISNEY’S FROZEN

This study compares the songs from the original, English-language version of the 2013 Disney film Frozen to those of the Dutch dubbed version, investigating how the thematic representation of love and fear differ between these versions. To support this inherently qualitative analysis, this study employs the triangle of aspects, an analytical model that identifies certain aspects and variables central to animated musical film dubbing, allowing a quantification of differences between dubbed versions. It is found that the dubbed songs differ most strongly from the original songs in the verbal code, which covers issues such as semantic sense and register, and least in the musical code, which concerns matters of rhyme scheme, rhythm, and singability. The effects of the changes are a slight backgrounding of the theme of love versus fear: whereas the source version presents and explores a clear dichotomy between love and fear, the dubbed version concentrates more on love as the ultimate goal of life, eliminating much of the importance of fear. These results show that quantitative data can be useful in qualitative analyses, presenting an important step in the development of the field of animated musical film dubbing within translation studies.

Racial slurs in Italian film dubbing

This paper explores how racial slurs are dealt with in Anglo-American films and rendered in films dubbed in Italian. It focuses on the racist epithets ‘nigger’, ‘gook’ and ‘zipper head’ with a view to unveiling the linguistic choices made by Italian audiovisual translators. Furthermore, it supports the claim that taboo topics vary from culture to culture and sheds some light on self-censorship, which has allegedly shifted from sexual and religious topics to ethnic slurs (Allan and Burridge 2006; Hughes 2006). In some cases the analysis reveals a wide spectrum of translation choices accompanied by subtle linguistic manipulations. In other cases translation choices tend to be fixed owing to the limited range of corresponding slurs in Italian. Also, the paper discusses self-censorship in contemporary Anglo-American films. In this regard, it is observed that ‘the n-word’ has characterized the majority of Anglo-American films since 2000 and has hallmarked a shift in self-censorship. The final question that this paper addresses is whether Italian culture is ready or not for this change.

The voice of comedy: Gracita Morales

This chapter analyses the typification and standardisation of the voice in Spanish cinema, which is argued as the result of a long history of film dubbing, with its strict codification of vocal types according to gender and role. This practice has resulted in a series of unwritten rules and expectations that continue to shape and restrict the kinds of voices that Spanish audiences hear on screen. Under these norms, while non-standard voices may be permitted and are even cultivated for comic and character parts, leading roles continue to demand what the chapter calls the ‘phonogenic’ expression of unproblematically feminine and masculine identities. With her unmistakable, high-pitched voice, the chapter shows how Gracita Morales was inevitably slotted into supporting roles, her child-like affect and lack of verbal inhibition put to classic comic ends as weapons used to skewer the pretensions of a would-be upwardly mobile and modernizing middle class. Despite being categorised in this manner, Gracita Morales become an example of what Kathleen Rowe calls ‘unruly women’, female comics who by talking back and laughing loudly claim their right to a traditionally male privilege, thereby challenging the notion of comedy as a male-dominated genre.