Читать книгу Language Variation and Multimodality in Audiovisual Translation - Dora Renna - Страница 4

This book embraces the interdisciplinary nature of translation studies (Munday 2008, 1), as it originates from the intersections of different branches of this discipline with other issues coming from various fields of investigation, to offer an innovative contribution to an urgent debate in audiovisual translation (AVT). Research in this field has long struggled to find an effective approach to deal with the complexity of the audiovisual products, whose presence is growing at an impressive rate, in a constant flow of intertwined texts and images eagerly consumed by the audience. These products, translated globally, represent the increasing interconnection of small social and linguistic realities across the planet.

During my BA and MA in Media Studies and my postgraduate degree in Linguistic and Cultural Mediation, I have always been interested in the way linguistic variation contributes to the construction of fictional “rationalizations of cultural difference,” or ethnotypes (van Doorslaer et al. 2016, 3), which become a strong political tool for both oppression and resistance. Indeed, when I started dealing with AVT, I immediately turned to linguistic variation, a long-standing challenge for all translators, but with its specificities in the field of multimodal products. In particular, since I grew up in Italy in the 1990s, my attention was drawn to dubbing, which replaces the speech of the characters while leaving images and music as they are in the source version. I wanted to discover how dubbing tackles the aporia of translating linguistic variation. As a novice, at the beginning of my PhD, I tried to follow the methodology I had often seen in other books, papers and conferences. It consisted of a textual analysis of the two versions, with a thorough explanation of how certain words and sentences were translated, of the missing, replaced or kept cultural references, and at times a final judgement on whether the translation could be considered accurate or acceptable (Toury 1995), sometimes on whether it was a good or bad translation. My very first attempt at AVT studies closely resembled this structure, but my background in media studies and linguistic and cultural mediation suggested to me something was lacking—I could not figure out what. That was when my application for the CETRA Summer School at KU Leuven was accepted, and the days spent at CETRA with brilliant colleagues and amazing professors completely changed my perspective. In particular, three facts I was presented with redirected (and significantly improved) my studies on linguistic variation in AVT: 1) freeing my work from the need to establish whether the translation was good would have helped me understand it without judgement; 2) one film was not enough to understand a phenomenon; and 3) understanding AVT means to see its polysemiotic nature (Chiaro 2008). These realizations meant three more challenges to accept to achieve my aims. Indeed, AVT is often caught between extensive quantitative but only textual corpus analyses and qualitative analyses of the film as a whole, but on rather small case studies (Gambier 2006; Ramos Pinto & Mubaraki 2020). More specifically, the approach of this study is informed by other work in linguistic variation, translation studies and AVT (Assis Rosa 2011; van Doorslaer et al. 2016; Fought 2003; Laviosa 2002; Lippi-Green 1998; Macedo et al. 2003), but also other fields, such as film studies and multimodality, for example, Pastra (2008) and Ramírez Berg (2002), and especially inspired by studies that have already pioneered the methodology here implemented (Ramos Pinto & Mubaraki 2020; Ramos Pinto 2009, 2017).

To sum up, the approach adopted in this book might be worth starting from its cover, which was specifically designed to represent it. Four elements emerge from the white background. Three arches, similar in shape but different in texture and shade, intersect and partly overlap, creating colour and texture alterations. These arches are partly framed within an opaque rectangle with a blurring effect. Inside the frame, the arches are still visible, but less clearly separated. The way an audiovisual product (be it the source or the target version) is conceived here perfectly resonates with the image. The blurring rectangle is the screen, which symbolizes the act of reproducing characters and their stories. The arches are fragments that are partly within the screen, but also outside of it: they represent the three levels of analysis identified in this study, the three dimensions that compose the audiovisual product: textual, diegetic and sociocultural (Ramos Pinto & Mubaraki 2020). The extension of the dimensions outside the screen has multiple meanings: on the one hand, it represents their existence outside the screen, as parts of the reality that is reproduced through the screen, albeit in a less clear-cut way. On the other hand, their presence outside the screen also symbolizes my attempt to stretch the three of them back into reality—not just the textual one.

The textual dimension is the analysis of the linguistic element of the film, the one that is subject to the translators’ and adapters’ intervention. It is not just the language in itself that undergoes analysis, as the focus is understanding “the extralinguistic meanings conventionally associated with those same varieties, meanings which are then imported to the film’s fictional world” (Ramos Pinto & Mubaraki 2020, 10). The research aims not to say whether the variety analysed is accurate compared to its real-world counterpart, but rather to see how its fictional transposition contributes to the construction of the ethnotypes, intended as fictional “rationalizations of cultural difference” (van Doorslaer et al. 2011, 3). The keyword is prestige, that is to say, “the character’s sociocultural outline in addition to his/her position within the sociocultural fictional context” (Ramos Pinto 2017: n.p.).

The diegetic dimension has proved to be the most difficult to tackle in a research context, given the focus of corpus-based translation studies on textual aspects (Díaz-Cintas 2008; Gambier 2006). Pioneers in this dimension (Ramos Pinto 2017; Ramos Pinto & Mubaraki 2020) have turned to multimodality to seek an answer, successfully drawing from it (Iedema 2003; Pastra 2008) to replace non-quantifiable image description with the establishment of multimodal relationships that, through accurate analysis, could better fit in a corpus. While multimodality acknowledges and embraces the complexity and the unity in the perception of an audiovisual product as a whole (Bateman et al. 2017, 33), the quandary lies in the very concept of analysis—by its nature, to analyse means to set apart. Here cinema studies on ethnotypes provide a set of references in the selection of the modes to be isolated and analysed (Ramírez Berg 2002) to make sure no crucial element is left out.

The sociocultural dimension is only sketched in this product-based, quantitative study, more in the form of an invitation to expand the debate to more fields (e.g. psychology and economics), as it consists of the effort to contextualize a product and to understand the observed translational choices in terms of ideology, the status of translator and translation in the target context, legibility and intelligibility for the target audience, differences between source and target cultures, audience profiling and expected product function (Antonini 2008; Calvanese 2011; Pavesi & Perego 2006; Ramos Pinto 2017).

This threefold framework has the aim to analyse the character design and redesign in source and target text in a corpus of films, considering both textual and non-textual aspects at the same time. Through this framework, it will be possible to answer several questions that constitute the smaller objectives of the research:

 Which language variety was used for each character in the source and the target text (ST and TT)?

 Which strategies might have been behind the change?

 What were the most common features for conveying a certain type of language? Did they change from ST to TT?

 How did these varieties build intermodal relationships with the non-textual elements of the film?

 Did the relationships change from ST to TT, and to what extent?

Since a corpus fitting the needs of this research did not exist, I had to build my own corpus, selecting and transcribing films featuring the Chicano gangster stereotype in American film.

Another point that may be useful to introduce is the choice of the selected case study. As a teenager, I was a passionate fan of action movies and dramas, especially those relating to gangsters and thug life. However, I did not realize the stereotyping potential of these audiovisual products, which are not supposed to be cultural, until later, thanks to media studies, translation studies and critical linguistics. Going back to those movies with a different knowledge made me aware of how deeply they had affected my imagery. Indeed, movies made to entertain the audience might let a cultural message trespass conscious defences and sink deeply into their mind. It must not be forgotten that the power of media in forging human perception of reality goes beyond our consciousness. Cinema is a powerful means to shape and reinforce collective memory (Fluck 2003, 224) that transcends experience, as proved by the tendency to feel more afraid of crime when exposed to great amounts of crime-related audiovisual products than when experiencing actual crime in everyday life (Van den Bulck 2004, 247). While several minorities are featured in gangster movies, the choice of Chicanos for this work depends on the following reasons. First, my Spanish competence allows me to understand code switches and recognise phonetic and suprasegmental similarities. I was also familiar with Chicano literature and visual arts through my studies, which allowed me to better understand historical and cultural references in the films. Another factor, external to my personal background, is the growing Mexican-American community. Moreover, while it is very unlikely to imagine that there would be Anglo Americans who have never met a Mexican American in their whole life, Italy does not really have a developed community of Mexican origin. In fact, Italy has a far more recent history of multicultural contact and immigration, to the extent that second-generation immigrants are yet to be considered a substantial part of the Italian labour market (Reyneri 2011, 99-100). Second-generation citizens of foreign origin have only recently become the subject of political debate, with the discussion around ius soli and ius sanguinis.1 Mexican immigration in Italy is rather limited and mainly concerns women; 67.3% of the 3,620 Mexicans registered in Italy in 2008 (Calvanese 2011, 34). Therefore, it is possible to assume that the media are an important source of (more or less distorted) information concerning Mexicans and Chicanos for numerous Italians.

The structure of this book is meant to take the reader into the proposed framework, from its background to a detailed exploration of its methodology, which also requires a description of the main features of the case study, to a thorough report of the findings. The first chapter briefly describes the theoretical foundations of the framework, with specific attention to its interdisciplinary approach. The disciplines that have contributed to the implementation of the framework are explored separately, and their relevance is explained. In the first subsection, Descriptive Translation Studies are considered, since through this approach the study of translation is liberated from the prescriptiveness that implies quality assessment. Subsection two calls corpus-based translation studies into question, with reference to the definition of a corpus for analysing translation. Language variation and its role in fiction are at the core of subsection three, with specific attention to their key role for authors and translators. Despite the central role of multimodality in audiovisual products, it has only recently sparked the interest of scholars, and the need for a multimodal approach is stressed in the last subsection. In particular, the main authors that inspired this book are presented here.

Against such a background, the second chapter presents the main linguistic and multimodal features of the case study while delving into the structure of the methodology, so that it can be used as a reference and as a starting point for further research in the field. In this book, methodology and results are equally important, as the debate is open, and every contribution is crucial to moving forward in research. The first two subsections introduce the case study from a linguistic point of view, exploring key concepts of linguistic variation and Chicano-English respectively. Such introduction is key to the understanding of the analysed characters, who are then presented in the third subsection, featuring a description of the Chicano gangster ethnotype and its function. More technical information about the corpus selection is provided in the fourth subsection, containing the practical considerations that informed the corpus selection. The last subsection is the heftiest, as it details the framework functioning, drawing examples from the corpus to clarify how the analysis was conducted.

The last chapter shows the results provided by the framework and offers an interpretation of the quantitative analysis of the multimodal corpus. The framework envisions three dimensions of analysis, which are analysed individually and then intertwined. The textual dimension yields important results concerning the way the films in the corpus were translated and the way language variation was linked to the prestige and social positioning of the characters in both source and target versions. Subsequently, the language results are embedded in their multimodal context thanks to a network of relationships with the other modes of the film in both the source and target version, in order to see whether and to what extent these relationships have changed through translation. The last subsection invites the contextualization of the results in a broader sociocultural dimension, to understand the reasons and the implications of translational choices.

Overall, the framework presented here, informed by the latest international trends in audiovisual translation and multimodality, works towards the complex task of operatively including multimodality in a rigorous corpus analysis of source and target versions. The aims are to advocate for and demonstrate the importance of bridging the gap between multimodality and corpus-based translation studies, and to stress the importance of the study of language variation and character design in audiovisual translation. In four years of research, dissemination and teaching,2 such aspects have emerged as especially compelling in a world of fading boundaries between screen and reality.

1 The attribution of citizenship in Italy generally follows the ius sanguinis. This means that the conditio sine qua non to be considered Italian is to have at least one Italian relative, regardless of the birthplace. On the one hand, this choice keeps a door open for those who have migrated from Italy; on the other, it can be seen as discriminating against the offspring of those who migrate to Italy, who have to go through muddled and costly procedures to obtain citizenship. The debate on the topic started in the late 1990s and periodically re-emerges (Camilli 2017).

2 Throughout the journey that brought this book to life, I have been teaching, tutoring and guest lecturing on undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate courses at various Italian Universities (University of Bari, University of Bergamo, University of Mantua, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia and Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and University of Verona), which helped me test my findings with future professionals of various fields.