A ground-breaking study of the roles played by foreign languages in film and television and their relationship to translation. The book covers areas such as subtitling and the homogenising use of English, and asks what are the devices used to represent foreign languages on screen?

Translating Popular Film is a ground-breaking study of the roles played by foreign languages in film and television and their relationship to translation. The book covers areas such as subtitling and the homogenizing use of English, and asks what are the devices used to represent foreign languages on screen?

This highly accessible introduction to translation theory, written by a leading author in the field, uses the genre of film to bring the main themes in translation to life. Through analyzing films as diverse as the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera, The Star Wars Trilogies and Lost in Translation, the reader is encouraged to think about both issues and problems of translation as they are played out on the screen and issues of filmic representation through examining the translation dimension of specific films. In highlighting how translation has featured in both mainstream commercial and arthouse films over the years, Cronin shows how translation has been a concern of filmmakers dealing with questions of culture, identity, conflict and representation. This book is a lively and accessible text for translation theory courses and offers a new and largely unexplored approach to topics of identity and representation on screen. Translation Goes to the Movies will be of interest to those on translation studies and film studies courses.

This rich collection of articles and essays by film historians, translation scholars, archivists, and curators presents film translation history as an exciting and timely area of research. It builds on the last twenty years of research into the history of dubbing and subtitling, but goes further, by showing how subtitling, dubbing, and other forms of audiovisual translation developed over the first fifty years of the twentieth century. This is the first book-length study, in any language, of the international history of audiovisual translation which includes silent cinema. Its scope covers national contexts both within Europe and beyond. It shows how audiovisual translation practices were closely tied to their commercial, technological and industrial contexts. The Translation of Films, 1900-1950 draws extensively on archival sources and expertise. In doing so it revisits and challenges some of the established narratives around film languages and the coming of sound. For instance, the volume shows how silent films, far from being straightforward to translate, went through a complex process of editing for international distribution. It also closely tracks the ferment of experiments in film translation during the transition to sound from 1927 to 1934 and later, as markets adjusted to the demands of synchronised film. The Translation of Films, 1900-1950 argues for a broader understanding of film translation: far from being limited to language transfer, it encompasses editing, localisation, censorship, paratextual framing, and other factors. It advocates for film translation to be considered as a crucial contribution not only to the worldwide circulation of films, but also to the art of cinema.

Uncovering the vital role of interpreters, dubbers and subtitlers in global film, Nornes examines the relationships between moving-image media and translation and contends that film was a globalized medium from its beginning and that its transnational traffic has been greatly influenced by interpreters.

Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2011 in the subject Interpreting / Translating, grade: A, University of Gdansk (Institute of English), course: Translation studies, language: English, abstract: Humour translation is an extremely difficult process which causes translators many problems. Rendering humour into a different language becomes even more complicated when the translator translates film dialogues for the purpose of dubbing or subtitling. The aim of this thesis is to analyse translation strategies and techniques applied in the process of humour translation in dubbing and subtitling. The analysis is based on two animated films: Shrek 2 and Ice Age. In the thesis the original version of film dialogues is compared with its dubbed and subtitled versions in Polish. The material for the study comes from DVD releases. The thesis is divided into two chapters. In the first chapter the concept of humour is explained and humour translation is described. In this chapter I also provide definitions of translation strategy and translation technique, explain the difference between these two concepts and describe possible translation strategies and techniques in humour translation. In the second part of the first chapter the specificity of audiovisual translation is discussed, and subtitling and dubbing are described as two different translation methods. The second chapter offers a comparison between the Polish dubbed and subtitled dialogue versions. In this chapter I describe translation strategies and techniques used by the translators and compare the humorous effect evoked by them with the humorous effect of the original dialogues.