Minority Languages and Film Subtitling: An Empirical Study Based on the Translation of Culture-bound Elements from Catalan into English

Abstract:

As the process of globalisation and the dominance of English as a world language expand, some regional and minority languages are becoming more marginalised due to the increasing perceived social and economic value of English and other major languages in the media. In the face of the challenges created by the globalisation process, this paper explores the translation of minority language films in the cinema industry, with special reference to the subtitling of Catalan-language films into English.

The study focuses primarily on subtitling as the most common type of audiovisual translation (AVT) for this source material and enabling its distribution in the international market. The corpus for this study comprises 14 Catalan films by the director Ventura Pons, together with their English-subtitled versions. Ventura Pons is considered one of the most internationally recognised directors of Catalan cinema today. In his films he strives to be a reference of the autochthonous culture and a signifier of cultural identity.

Based on the data collected from the corpus, this study analyses the way in which the culture-bound elements (CBEs) encountered in Catalan films have been rendered from the source texts (STs) into the target texts (TTs) through the process of subtitling. For the purpose of analysis, the translation of CBEs was selected as the focal point of this study to examine the translation behaviour of subtitlers in response to the translation problem arising from the presence of numerous CBEs in the STs.

The paper investigates the translation techniques and overall strategies used in the rendering of CBEs by empirically exploring the connections among the following parameters: audiovisual constraints, interculturality, film genre, domain and translation techniques. More particularly, through a quantitative analysis of the results, the study aims to identify the most frequently recurring techniques and strategies used in such cases and to reveal symptomatic patterns of translation behaviour that may have been adopted when rendering the CBEs under study.

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