Translating For Television

Translating Culture Specific References on Television provides a model for investigating the problems posed by culture specific references in translation, drawing on case studies that explore the translational norms of contemporary Italian dubbing practices. This monograph makes a distinctive contribution to the study of audiovisual translation and culture specific references in its focus on dubbing as opposed to subtitling, and on contemporary television series, rather than cinema. Irene Ranzato’s research involves detailed analysis of three TV series dubbed into Italian, drawing on a corpus of 95 hours that includes nearly 3,000 CSR translations. Ranzato proposes a new taxonomy of strategies for the translation of CSRs and explores the sociocultural, pragmatic and ideological implications of audiovisual translation for the small screen.

An introduction by leading experts in the field to the fascinating subject of translating audiovisual programmes for the television, the cinema, the Internet and the stage and the problems the differences between cultures can cause.

In most subtitling countries, those lines at the bottom of the screen are the most read medium of all, for which reason they deserve all the academic attention they can get. This monograph represents a large-scale attempt to provide such attention, by exploring the norms of subtitling for television. It does so by empirically investigating a large corpus of television subtitles from Scandinavia, one of the bastions of subtitling, along with other European data. The aim of the book is twofold: first, to provide an advanced and comprehensive model for investigating translation problems in the form of Extralinguistic Cultural References (ECRs). Second, to empirically explore current European television subtitling norms, and to look into future developments in this area. This book will be of interest to anyone interested in gaining access to state-of-the-art tools for translation analysis, or in learning more about the norms of subtitling, based on empirically reliable and current material.

"Audiovisual Translation: Subtitling" is an introductory textbook which provides a solid overview of the world of subtitling. Based on sound research and first-hand experience in the field, the book focuses on generally accepted practice but identifies current points of contention, takes regional and medium-bound variants into consideration, and traces new developments that may have an influence on the evolution of the profession. The individual chapters cover the rules of good subtitling practice, the linguistic and semiotic dimensions of subtitling, the professional environment, technical considerations, and key concepts and conventions, providing access to the core skills and knowledge needed to subtitle for television, cinema and DVD. Also included are graded exercises covering core skills. "Audiovisual Translation: Subtitling" can be used by teachers and students as a coursebook for the classroom or for self-learning.It is also aimed at translators and other language professionals wishing to expand their sphere of activity. While the working language of the book is English, an accompanying DVD contains sample film material in Dutch, English, French, Italian and Spanish, as well as a range of dialogue lists and a key to some of the exercises. The DVD also includes WinCAPS, SysMedia's professional subtitling preparation software package, used for broadcast television around the world and for many of the latest multinational DVD releases of major Hollywood projects.

Television series are regarded as significant works of popular culture in today's society, which explains the increasing demand to translate them into other languages to reach larger audiences. This book focuses on one of the two most common modes of audiovisual translation for this type of product: subtitling. The naturalness that is expected in television dialogue together with the spoken-to-written medium conversion entailed in subtitling pose a challenge for professionals, who have been typically blamed for neutralising the source dialogue. Little to no empirical evidence, however, has been provided to effectively address this issue to date. This book offers a contrastive study of the American English television dialogue and the Castilian Spanish subtitles of three popular police procedurals: Castle (2009), Dexter (2006) and The Mentalist (2008). After introducing some basic notions to frame the study - such as translation norms, audiovisual text and fictive orality - more than twenty lexical and morphosyntactic features in the series are analysed from a qualitative and quantitative point of view. Throughout the chapters, a combination of corpus-based and corpus-driven methodologies are used to offer a sound, empirically grounded characterisation of the language employed in these audiovisual productions and their translations.

The history of subtitles in Europe / Jan Ivarsson -- Screen translation in mainland China / Qian Shaochang -- Subtitling in Japan / Karima Fumitoshi -- The history of subtitling in Korea / Lee Young Koo -- The two worlds of subtitling : the case of vulgarisms and sexually-oriented language / Gilbert C.F. Fong -- A functional gap between dubbing and subtitling / He Yuanjian -- Subtitling as a multi-modal translation / Chuang Ying-ting -- Let the words do the talking : the nature and art of subtitling / Gilbert C.F. Fong -- A critical evaluation of a Chinese subtitled version of Hitchcock's Spellbound / Chapman Chen -- I translate, you adapt, they dub / Sergio Patou-Patucchi -- The translation of film dialogues for dubbing / Zhang Chunbai -- Loss of meaning in dubbing / Lu Danjun -- Dubbing and subtitling : art or craft? / Rupert Chan -- Translation imperative : synchronise discipline and technique / Janet Tauro -- Translating understanding and non-understanding through subtitling : a case study of a Finnish subtitled translation of Comme des Rois / Kari Jokelainen -- Translating subtitles for the Hong Kong audience : limitations and difficulties / Shu Kei -- Surtitling for Xiqu (Chinese opera) in the theatre / Jessica W.Y. Yeung -- The pedagogy of subtitling / Corinne Imhauser.