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Translation and the Construction of Identity: Abstracts
Date: 12-14 August 2004
Venue: Sookmyung Women's University, Seoul, Korea
Nicole Baumgarten
The paper presents work in progress from a study that developed within the
project Covert Translation which is currently carried out at the Research Center
on Multilingualism, the University of Hamburg. Within an extended
systemic-functional framework (cf. Halliday 1994) the present study investigates
the James Bond movie series and its German language versions from the 1960s to
the present. The aim is twofold. First, to investigate the historical
development of the meaning relationship between visual and verbal information in
the original English and the German dubbed versions of the films, and to clarify
whether and in what respect English communicative preferences impact on language
use in German translations in mainstream film. Second, to provide a mode of
analysis that allows the investigation of texts that combine visual and verbal
information in monolingual as well as in language- and culture-contrastive
approaches.
Panel 7: The Verbal, The Visual, The Translator
Towards a Model of Analysing Language in Visual Media
University of Hamburg, Germany
Results from initial analyses indicate that the German translations of the
original English verbal information ‘handle’ the co-occurring visual information
in significantly different ways. For example, the German translations tend to
make use of additional pronominal references and deictic devices, thereby
overtly connecting linguistic items to pictorial elements. In the English
language versions, however, the relationship between the verbal utterance and
the visual information being referred to more often remains lexically implicit.
This kind of explicitation in the translations results in various forms of
shifts with respect to the films’ narrational/presentational strategies (Bordwell
1985). These changes also have a bearing on the ideational, interpersonal, and
textual dimensions of the individual text’s function, which can manifest
themselves for instance in different realizations of gender relations, concepts
of ethnicity, and/or plot organization (cf. Baumgarten 2003).
Translations of popular mass-produced films are so-called ‘covert’ translations
(House 1997), i.e. translations which do not ‘betray’ their status as
translations but are received by the audience in the target culture as
‘original’ texts. Film as a medium of popular culture plays an important role in
establishing and reinforcing particular connections between images and language,
and in communicating these to large audiences. Translations of popular
mainstream films are a prime way of manipulating such connections with a view to
accommodating local preferences. The paper presents a method and an analytical
model to investigate and account for such manipulations.
© IATIS 2003