1,720,982 research outputs found
CHANGING IDENTITIES IN TRANSLATION: The case of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary and Bridget Jones. The Edge of Reason
No full textBridget Jones’s Diary is a novel written by Helen Fielding in 1996 and is considered one of the best-known examples of the chick-lit genre. Bridget Jones. The Edge of Reason is its sequel, published in 1999. Chick-lit is a genre which comprises novels mainly written by women, about women, for women, which can easily be inferred by the name of the genre itself: chick is an American slang term for a young woman, and lit is the abbreviation of literature. Chick-lit novels are usually set in a contemporary world. The main characters are single women in their twenties or thirties, who mostly work in the publishing or the advertising sectors, and whose careers are definitely important for them. Moreover, they are embedded in pop culture, they are obsessed with their appearance and have an utter fixation with their weight. Chick-lit has sometimes been considered as a subcategory of the romance novel genre, because it very often includes romantic elements. However, the sentimental relationships of the protagonists are not the only important issue in the development of the plot of the novels which belong to this genre. In fact, their circle of close friends – who are either female or gay – play an extremely important role in their lives. Moreover, chick-lit differs from the romance genre also on a stylistic level, as it is characterized by a very personal and confidential tone and by the constant presence of humour. The language is usually informal and colloquial, with the characters using quite a lot of slang and occasionally obscene terms (see Ferriss and Young 2006; Harzewski 2011; Montoro 2012). Both Bridget Jones’s Diary and Bridget Jones. The Edge of Reason are written in the form of a personal diary and narrate the life of the protagonist throughout a whole year (with the latter starting from the point when the former ended, in spite of the fact that it was published three years later). Bridget is a single woman in her early thirties who lives in London. She is obsessed with her love life and is constantly looking for a stable relationship. Her diaries are filled with notes on her weight, on her daily intake of calories, on the quantity of alcohol consumed and on the number of cigarettes smoked. The tone of the books is very humorous and light-hearted, and it often relies on the use of colloquial, slangy, and also taboo words and expressions. Finally, both novels abound in references to contemporary popular culture, especially British, as Bridget often mentions names of brands and shops, but also broadcasters, TV characters and TV shows, as well as politicians, academics, writers, journalists, documentarists, literary characters, novels and artists. Even though the Italian translations of the novels have been performed by two different translators (Olivia Crosio and Maura Maioli), they display a similar approach towards the target text. In fact, they both very often apply a series of strategies which seem to aim at domesticating the text (see Venuti 1995). Indeed, in their attempt to “move the text towards the reader”, many of the abovementioned references have not been transposed, as they have either been omitted, or generalized, or substituted with other references, which are presumably more familiar to the Italian reader. Even though it ought to be noted that some of the references have been maintained, it is a fact that this approach, which may be successful in avoiding a potential disruption of the suspension of disbelief in the reader, does indeed have some consequences on Bridget’s characterisation. Her identity, in fact, undergoes some subtle, but radical changes. A first general effect of this domesticating approach is that the Italian Bridget Jones turns out to be less typically British. Indeed, by omitting the references to the various British culture-specific items (see Aixela 1997), the character appears to lose her Britishness, at least to some extent, becoming a more general citizen of the world. A second effect which is due to the abovementioned domesticating strategies is the fact that the translated Bridget becomes a simpler and less cultured person than her English counterpart. In fact, even though the character is represented as a person who is mainly interested in frivolous matters, such as her weight and her love life, it is a fact that she is a person with a certain level of education, whose interests include literature, art, politics and journalism. By domesticating part of these references through their omission, generalization or substitution, Bridget ’s identity has undergone a rather radical change in translation in this respect. From a purely linguistic perspective, moreover, it ought to be noted that Bridget’s typical colloquial and informal style is partly achieved through the use of abbreviations, interjections and onomatopoeic words, which are often standardized in translation. Therefore, also in this case, it is possible to state that the Italian translation has an impact on the characterization of Bridget’s identity. In short, it is interesting to note that, even though the translation of the two books have been performed by two different translators, their strategies seem to be rather similar. This contributes to achieving a very similar effect on the identity of the main character, which, as already stressed, undergoes a substantial change in translation
Automatic generated intralingual and interlingual subtitling and the need for human intervention
No full textAutomatic speech recognition technologies (ASR) are language-specific computer programmes that convert spoken input into written text in the language of the original speech. Introduced in 2009, YouTube’s auto-captioning technology, built on Google’s speech recognition technology, allows users to automatically provide intralingual subtitles for the videos they upload on the platform. Since their early beginnings, speech recognition technologies have improved remarkably. Nevertheless, they still face several challenges, mainly related to linguistic issues, such as the disambiguation of homophones, the lack of recognition of named entities (people, institutions, brands), and the specificities of spoken language (among which different accents or pronunciations). This obviously has an impact on another form of subtitling, namely automatic interlingual subtitling. The integration of ASR and Machine Translation into platforms like YouTube has the purpose to supply auto-generated subtitles in instances where official ones are unavailable. However, despite improvements in technology and the vast resources of Google and YouTube, automatic captioning can fail to convey the message accurately
“You know, that’s from Quadrophenia”. Quentin Tarantino e le citazioni: strategie di traduzione nel doppiaggio italiano
No full textI film di Quentin Tarantino sono caratterizzati da uno stile preciso che comprende una serie di elementi narrativi e linguistici ricorrenti e ben riconoscibili dal pubblico. Uno di questi è senza dubbio la presenza di innumerevoli citazioni di altri film e registi. Questo saggio ha l’obiettivo di analizzare nello specifico le citazioni esplicite presenti nei suoi dialoghi e le strategie utilizzate nella traduzione italiana per il doppiaggio, prendendo come oggetto di analisi i film sceneggiati dall’autore nei suoi primi 15 anni di carriera (1992-2007)
“Per mille sardine!” Italian identity in the Pixar animated film Luca and in its Italian dubbed version
No full textThis paper investigates the construction of Italian identity in the film Luca (2021), focusing in particular on the use of language and on the strategies used in its Italian dubbed version. Luca is a film where the construction of Italian identity is undoubtedly extremely important, which has been achieved by exploiting various strategies, both narrative, visual, and verbal. The aim of the study was to focus in particular on the importance of language, as it turns out to be crucial for the identification of the characters as belonging to either the group of the
sea monsters or the group of human beings. The sea monsters, in fact, speak a language variety identifiable as standard General American English, whereas the humans speak English with a thick Italian accent, and their variety is interspersed with Italian words/phrases and sometimes they also switch to Italian at the level of entire sentences. The analysis of the Italian dubbed version of the film has revealed that the Italian dubbing professionals have opted for a general strategy of neutralization, therefore erasing any trace of distinction between the variety spoken by the sea monsters and that spoken by the humans, as all characters speak standard Italian, with no accents or other distinctive features
The Discreet Charm of Manipulation
No full textThe act of translating is not, and has never been, an innocent activity in which a set of linguistic items are permutated by their ‘dictionary equivalents’ in a different language and the manipulation of (audiovisual) texts has been a constant over the times and continues to be rife, irrespective of the political and cultural regimes that happen to be in power. As active and engaged agents in the transmission of social values and ideas, translators become a dynamic force for cultural and political evolution, a catalyst for deviations or compliance, often triggered by ideological motives and allegiances, that the translation scholar is called to unmask
Ideological Manipulation in Audiovisual Translation
No full textIn the presentation of the translation studies journal Meta 57(2), a special issue dedicated to “The Manipulation of Audiovisual Translation”, editor Díaz Cintas (2012: 275) noted that “despite the crucial role played by audiovisual media in our society, little has been written on the impact that power, ideology, censorship, and manipulation have when translating these programmes into other languages and cultures”. The volume was a collection of essays dealing with the many facets in which translation and manipulation intertwine when dealing with the transfer of audiovisual products from one language to another. The scholar ended his introduction inviting colleagues to carry out further research in such an exciting field.
Four years later, Jorge Díaz Cintas together with Irene Ranzato and Ilaria Parini present a new collection of essays on the topic of ideology and manipulation in audiovisual translation, with articles from scholars from various parts of the world, dealing with different kinds of audiovisual products and different modes of translation involved.
Given the paramount importance that the socio-cultural dimension has for the topics broached, Altre Modernità turns out to be a most pertinent site to publish this special issue, given the interest that the journal has always shown towards culture and modernity in all their manifestations. In particular, the issue especially conforms to the interests of the journal because the articles collected explore the field of ideological manipulation in audiovisual translation in the most disparate countries from all over the world, from Europe (UK, Italy and Spain), to Asia (China and Taiwan), to the Middle East (Egypt and Iran)
To translate or not to translate dialects in subtitling? The case of Pif’s "La mafia uccide solo d’estate"
No full textThe difficulty of translating dialects has been extensively studied over the years, firstly by scholars who focused on the (un)translatability of dialects in literature, and more recently by an increasing number of academics who have been investigating the issue within the field of audiovisual translation, both in dubbing and in subtitling. This study aims to analyse the strategies used in subtitling to translate into English the Sicilian dialect spoken in the Italian film La mafia uccide solo d’estate, directed by Pif in 2013. In this film, the use of dialect is not simply a tool to indicate the geographical origins of the characters, but it is exploited to construe their identity. Indeed, language variation is a device used purposefully to distinguish the ‘good’ characters from the ‘bad’ ones, and, as such, it is a means of identification. The results of the analysis will also be compared to those of previous studies conducted in this research area. Finally, the paper will attempt to provide some potential solutions that might be adopted in the subtitling of similar products, based on previous studies performed by the author on the original dialogues of some Hollywood films
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
To translate or not to translate dialects in subtitling? The case of Pif’s La mafia uccide solo d’estate
No full textThe difficulty of translating dialects has been extensively studied over the years, firstly by scholars who focused on the (un)translatability of dialects in literature, and more recently by an increasing number of academics who have been investigating the issue within the field of audiovisual translation, both in dubbing and in subtitling. This study aims to analyse the strategies used in subtitling to translate into English the Sicilian dialect spoken in the Italian film La mafia uccide solo d’estate, directed by Pif in 2013. In this film, the use of dialect is not simply a tool to indicate the geographical origins of the characters, but it is exploited to construe their identity. Indeed, language variation is a device used purposefully to distinguish the ‘good’ characters from the ‘bad’ ones, and, as such, it is a means of identification. The results of the analysis will also be compared to those of previous studies conducted in this research area. Finally, the paper will attempt to provide some potential solutions that might be adopted in the subtitling of similar products, based on previous studies performed by the author on the original dialogues of some Hollywood films.The difficulty of translating dialects has been extensively studied over the years, firstly by scholars who focused on the (un)translatability of dialects in literature, and more recently by an increasing number of academics who have been investigating the issue within the field of audiovisual translation, both in dubbing and in subtitling. This study aims to analyse the strategies used in subtitling to translate into English the Sicilian dialect spoken in the Italian film La mafia uccide solo d’estate, directed by Pif in 2013. In this film, the use of dialect is not simply a tool to indicate the geographical origins of the characters, but it is exploited to construe their identity. Indeed, language variation is a device used purposefully to distinguish the ‘good’ characters from the ‘bad’ ones, and, as such, it is a means of identification. The results of the analysis will also be compared to those of previous studies conducted in this research area. Finally, the paper will attempt to provide some potential solutions that might be adopted in the subtitling of similar products, based on previous studies performed by the author on the original dialogues of some Hollywood films
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