Abstract

Keywords: dialect, multimedia translation, audiovisual translation, screen translation, case studies

The interest shown in the Special Issue on “The Translation of Dialects in Multimedia” which appeared in inTRAlinea in 2010, has been such that we have decided to extend the discussion on these themes with a second Special Issue which also deals with issues concerning the translation within a multimedia environment of “dialect elements”. By dialect elements we mean those elements that originate from more or less codified minority languages that are not officially recognised, or only partially so, but that bear important literary and cultural traditions and that are increasingly subject to a process of patoisement or creolization, such as many Italian and German dialects.

The Call for papers for this issue invited proposals on

a complex, interdisciplinary subject area involving linguistics, communication studies, film studies and translation studies as well as other areas of cultural studies, sociology and other disciplines. The main topics to be covered include dubbing, subtitling films in dialect and linguistic varieties; theatre translation; cultural transfer processes in the characteristics of dialects; archaisms, regionalisms, varieties in the continuum between dialect and standard language; diglossia (national language and regional or local language; ‘official’ and ‘non official’ language); the use of new technologies in the translation of dialects.

We have selected those that we felt sought an empirical and theoretical approach, with both sociolinguistic and didactic implications, and that went beyond the mere case study which has been the dominant mode in the last 20 years for articles on multimedia, screen or audiovisual translation.

If, on the one hand, the descriptive approach of most translation studies from the 1990s onwards proved to be particularly fruitful, especially in the area commonly known as multimedia or screen translation, leading to a wealth of empirical studies in a wide variety of languages that made it possible to better understand the translation processes in this field and to highlight many of its problems – with, it must be said, a seemingly endless round of papers illustrating the “mistakes” made in the translation/localization of some film or television series; on the other hand, we have to face the uncomfortable fact that this immense collective scientific endeavour seems to have had no discernable impact on the industry, as is proved by the many recent case studies that, incredibly, continue to be produced along exactly the same lines as those of 20 years ago. Despite the efforts made to involve professional representatives in this academic endeavour, such as the associations of dubbing actors and dialogue adaptors for example, the translators, adaptors and subtitlers of the cinema and television industries do not appear to have paid any serious attention to the work that has been carried out and, as they are crushed by the increasing pressures of neo-liberal work methods and business models that place the time-profit equation above all other priorities, the gap between the study of translation and its professional practice has actually got wider, with scholars relegated to their academic observatories and seemingly unable to influence the professional world with the results of their research.

At which point it seems natural to ask whether there is any sense in continuing to produce a certain kind of case study and to suggest that a more fruitful approach, that could enhance the potential for transfer into the profession, might lie in some of the opportunities and stimulus that dialect translation, and other more literary “multimedia” areas such as stage translation, could provide. In these areas, despite the limitations currently being imposed on the cultural industries, there is still room for the observations and suggestions of the translation scholar to find concrete application within professional practice.

In this context it will be necessary to actually redefine what we mean by “multimedia”, limiting it to certain fields, before it becomes so completely inflated that it loses all meaning. We need to ask ourselves what kind of research can usefully be included within the remit of this term, taking into account the terminological and substantive competition of  neighbouring research areas such as mutlimodal and multidimensional translation. It seems fair to say that, as long as languages continue to change and evolve and produce varieties, of whatever degree, there will continue to be studies on the implications of these “dialects” for translation; however, it is more difficult to see multimedia transaltion studies continuing to prosper if their focus is not adequately circumscribed and if they continue to be so self-referential and detached from, and essentially ignored by, the professional world they address.

About the author(s)

Giovanni Nadiani (✝2016) completed a PhD in Translation Science at the University of Bologna and was a tenured researcher & lecturer in German Translation at the Department of Interpreting and Translation of the University of Bologna. Giovanni was also a prolific poet, playwright and author, and was widely viewed as one of the best dialect poets in Italy. His reputation was such that his works were translated into German, Flemish and Catalan (among others) and he was awarded a number of literary prizes both in Italy and abroad. Giovanni was also a founding member of Intralinea and acted as coordinating editor for a number of years.

Christopher Rundle is a tenured researcher in Translation Studies at the Department of Interpreting and Translation of the University of Bologna, Italy. He is also Honorary Research Fellow in Translation and Italian Studies at the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures of the University of Manchester, UK. His main research interests lie in the history of translation, in particular translation and fascism. He is the author of the monograph "Publishing Translations in Fascist Italy" (Peter Lang, 2010), and co-editor with Kate Sturge of the volume "Translation Under Fascism" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). He is also the editor of the recent Special Issue of The Translator (Vol. 20 No.1, 2014) on "Theories and Methodologies of Translation History". He is the coordinating editor of inTRAlinea.

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